New Brunswick Archives

Anna Lynn Tom is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Comparative Literature and India Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. She received the Indian Council of Social Sciences Research (ICSSR) doctoral research fellowship in 2022 for her study on interventional feminist practices in contemporary visual art in India. Previously, she was as an assistant professor in English at St. Joseph’s College of Commerce, Bengaluru. She completed her master’s from EFL University, Hyderabad, focusing in Indian and world literatures.

Anna has published critical writing on gender, art and culture on Indian online platforms such as The Chakkar, Live Wire, Catharsis, Articulate, and ASAP Art Connect. She has also published book chapters and academic papers in research journals. She has presented her ongoing work on the presence of women and queer artists in the contemporary Indian art scene at national and international conferences. Through her doctoral research, Anna aims to understand different methods of reading feminist art of the Indian contemporary through bodily mediated encounters within the decolonial avant-garde.

As a Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, Anna is conducting a comparative analysis of understanding feminist interventions during the period of the women’s movements (roughly 1960 – 1990) in the U.S. and India through an exploration of the Miriam Schapiro Archives on Women Artists. Anna is an avid consumer of fiction and cinema. She also practices experimental forms of writing and photography.

Ms. Pragyan Srivastava is the founder of Chalat Musafir – India’s first travel journalism media house. She initially ideated a multimedia platform bringing together travel writers, photographers, video bloggers, historians, cultural artists and experts to create high quality, high impact, culturally rooted, undiscovered stories of India. She bootstrapped funds to on-board 10 partners (3 Directors, 7+ colleagues) & over a thousand contributors, and set-up a website. She established a unique & thriving community with over a million followers across 3 social media streams, traveled across and stayed in all states of India to capture the real essence of her culture, and forge partnerships with socio-cultural-political leaders, curating over ten thousand impact driven, convergent stories covering topics across domains.

Chalat Musafir has curated original travel and exploration related content, with a sharp focus on frugal travel especially for women, spurring an increased interest among domestic women travelers leading to over fifty percent of stories being contributed by them. Additionally, her team has been redefining the role of travel in journalism through covering impactful, socially relevant stories of change-makers. They also successfully recommended Dr. Yogi Aeron, a philanthropic surgeon from rural Himalayas for the Padma Shree award, the fourth highest civilian award in India; the story catalyzed a lot of public interest in his endeavor of over ten thousand surgeries.

Ms. Srivastava has pursued a postgraduate diploma at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC). She has more than seven years of experience working in Indian media. A Fulbright-Nehru Master’s Fellowship would allow her to learn from and emulate the bold and transformational work of trailblazing U.S. journalists like Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohay and build an ecosystem of next generation journalists across India and the US who would enrich democracies by giving purpose to and building bridges among diverse people across the world.