Kolkata Archives - Page 2 of 3

Umesh Garg

Dr. Umesh Garg, Professor of Physics at the University of Notre Dame, graduated from Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani, and obtained a PhD in experimental nuclear physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. After postdoctoral work at the Cyclotron Institute, Texas A & M University, he joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1982.

Dr. Garg’s area of expertise is experimental nuclear physics. His current research interests include experimental investigation of compressional-mode giant resonances and exotic quantal rotation in nuclei. Some of his major accomplishments include the discovery of the isoscalar giant dipole resonance, an exotic mode of nuclear vibration, and elucidation of its properties; experimental determination of the nuclear incompressibility and the asymmetry term; first observation of longitudinal wobbling in nuclei; first observation of tidal waves in nuclei; first observation of a composite pair of chiral rotational bands, and affirmation of chirality in odd-A nuclei; and, first observation of multiple chiral bands (MχD) in nuclei. His research efforts have been truly international, involving collaborations over the years with scientists in Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, France, Finland, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for Advancement of Science. Dr. Garg was a Fulbright Specialist Awardee on Physics Education (2015-2020) and has been a JSPS (Japan) Fellow (2012) and PKU (China) Fellow (2012). He has been a consultant/visiting or adjunct professor at many universities and institutions: Argonne National Laboratory; BARC, Mumbai; GSI, Darmstadt; Peking University: Texas A & M University; TIFR, Mumbai; Xi’an Jiaotong University; and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.

Dr. Garg has served on a number of committees and boards, including the APS Committee on Governance, and the Program Committee of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics. He currently serves on the Board of Editors of the journal Progress of Theoretical and Experimental Physics.

The proposed Fulbright-Nehru project aims at enhancing collaborations with Indian scientists on investigations of chirality and wobbling in nuclei. These exotic modes of rotation are unique to triaxial nuclei—ellipsoids with all three axes unequal. Dr. Garg and his associates aims to perform measurements using the Indian National Gamma Array, a unique and truly world-class detector system, to study the band structures associated with chirality and wobbling. He also intends to give a series of lectures across India on these topics, along with some “general purpose” lectures meant to inspire students aspiring to pursue a career in physics.

Sarah Levenstam

Sarah Levenstam is pursuing a doctoral degree in the anthropology of religion at the University of Chicago, Divinity School, in Chicago, Illinois. She holds an MA in religious studies, also from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, and a dual BA in religious studies and anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. Sarah’s doctoral dissertation examines ideas and practices of dog management and care across India and Britain against the backdrop of imperial and national public works projects, international humanitarianism, and transnational animal welfare movements from 1857 through the present.

At the University of Chicago, Sarah’s research has been generously supported by the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS), the Nicholson Center for British Studies, and the Divinity School. She has received Critical Language Scholarships, Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, COSAS Fellowships, and an American Institute of Indian Studies Scholarship for language studies in Bangla, Urdu, and Sanskrit. She has previously worked in international education at World Learning, in historical and archival research for Hudson Institute, and in accessibility advocacy and community outreach with Rubin Museum of Art and the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions. She also fosters dogs for an animal shelter in Chicago.

Sarah’s Fulbright-Hayes research is tracing the transformation of the legal status of free-roaming dogs from straying “ferae naturae”, contained and culled in 19th-century colonial Calcutta, to legally-recognized “street dogs” who have accrued material and moral value in today’s Kolkata. She is looking at how dogs have inhabited this changing city and how the metrics of evaluating them as valuable or disposable have changed with time. She is also studying what the connected histories of dogs and humans together navigating this city’s public spaces reveal about cross-species hierarchies, practices of place-making, and claims of belonging in Kolkata.

Catherine Nelli

Catherine Nelli completed her BA with honors from Brown University in May 2023. There she studied Sanskrit classics, comparative literature, and international and public Affairs. Catherine also completed two senior honors theses, “On Nineteenth-Century Indology: Divergences between Sanskrit and Colonial French and English Reception of Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda” and “Between Empire and Post-Colonial Nation-Building: A Comparative Analysis of Nationalism’s Role in French India’s Decolonization in Chandernagore and Pondicherry (1947–1954)”. She is interested in colonial, transcultural literary reception, Sanskrit commentaries, and Bengali interactions with Sanskrit texts.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Catherine is accessing the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the Bhaktivedanta Research Center in Kolkata, the French Institute of Pondicherry, and the Records Centre archives in Puducherry. She is also working with her affiliates in the Sanskrit and comparative literature departments at Jadavpur University and the École française d’Extrême-Orient to investigate French and English colonial reception of the Gītagovinda, a classical Sanskrit love poem, in tandem and tension with intracultural Sanskrit and Bengali commentarial receptions.

Devin Creed

Devin Creed is a PhD candidate in South Asian history at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He has completed field exams in modern South Asian history, global British empire, food history, and science and empire. Devin’s dissertation examines the changes in the practices and ideologies of “giving for eating” in the context of famines in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asia. He works with sources in Bangla, Hindi, Urdu, and English. At Duke, Devin has been a Kenan Graduate Fellow, a Capper Fellow in intellectual history, and a fellow at the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge. He has made public presentations on: the erotica of the pickle in South Asian literature and history; traces of Portuguese cuisine in modern West Bengal; the political theory of B.R. Ambedkar; and the history of Catholic missions in Meghalaya. His research interests include metabolic and ecological histories, food and fermentation, and capitalism and imperialism.

He has previously received grants to conduct research in Philadelphia (on the Knights of Labor), London (on British famine policy), Northern Ireland (on martyrdom in the Irish Republican Army), and India (on famine relief). He received his MA in modern European history from Villanova University (Pennsylvania) and his BA in economics and English literature from Hillsdale College (Michigan).

Devin is an avid cook and food experimenter who spends a good deal of his time pickling, fermenting, baking, and cooking. He enjoys reading science fiction, watching films, backpacking, hiking, singing, and learning languages.

Devastating famines punctuated British colonial rule in India, a period that saw famines in Bengal in 1770 and 1943 which killed over 10 million people. Devin’s Fulbright-Nehru project is arguing that the Indian responses to states of endemic malnutrition and famine played a significant role in creating the postcolonial regimes of food charity – what he calls “giving for eating” – in India today. Devin’s research is being driven by the following question: how did inherited understandings and practices of gifting food change in the face of widespread famine, new ideas of Western humanitarianism, and the birth of modern nutrition science?

Jeffrey Withey

Prof. Jeffrey Withey received a BA in biology from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD in cellular and molecular biology from the University of Michigan. He also did postdoctoral work in bacterial pathogenesis at the University of Michigan. In 2006, he joined the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology, and Immunology at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit and now holds the rank of professor.

Prof. Withey’s research has focused on enteric bacterial pathogens, primarily Vibrio cholerae, the cause of human cholera. He has studied the regulation of V. cholerae virulence and identified factors in the human gut that can enhance or suppress virulence. In recent years, the focus of Withey’s lab has moved to studying environmental reservoirs for V. cholerae and other human pathogens, including Shigella, Salmonella, and the adherent-invasive E. coli. To facilitate these studies, he has developed models for these enteric bacterial pathogens in a natural aquatic host, the zebrafish (Danio rerio).

In his Fulbright project in India at the National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases (NICED), Prof. Withey is developing new environmental models for Campylobacter and Enterotoxigenic E. coli in zebrafish, together with his Indian collaborators. These pathogens cause millions of cases of severe diarrhea per year, both in the developing world and in the U.S. In particular, childhood diarrhea in the developing world is highly associated with stunting, which can cause lifelong effects on health. The environmental life cycles of these pathogens are poorly understood and the goal of the research is to determine how they survive and thrive in environmental niches such as fish. Wild fish, both from nearby waterbodies and from fish markets, are also being examined to determine if major human enteric pathogens are carried in their guts. The long-term goal of these studies is to facilitate bioremediation to reduce or eliminate the major causes of diarrhea in the developing world.

Sunanda Sanyal

Originally from India, Dr. Sunanda Sanyal is currently a professor of art history and critical studies at the College of Art & Design of Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has been teaching at this institution since 1999. He has a PhD in art history from Emory University (2000), an MFA in art history from Ohio University (1993), and an MFA in visual arts from the University of California, San Diego (1990).

Dr. Sanyal’s research interests include contemporary artists from former colonies in global discourses, and politics of representation and identity. He has chaired panels on contemporary artists of color at various conferences, including those of the College Art Association, the African Studies Association, the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, and the American Council of South and Southeast Asian Art. He has published articles and reviews of contemporary art in journals and contributed chapters to volumes of essays on art history and criticism. Some of his publications are: “Critiquing the Critique: El Anatsui and the Politics of Inclusion”, World Art (Routledge); “‘Being Modern’: Identity Debates and Makerere’s Art School in the 1960s”, A Companion to Modern African Art (Wiley-Blackwell); and “Teaching Art History at an Art School: Making Sense from the Margin”, Transforming Classroom Culture: Inclusive Pedagogical Approaches (Palgrave Macmillan). In 2009, Dr. Sanyal produced and directed a two-part documentary film, A Homecoming Spectacle, on the visual culture of Durga Pujo in Kolkata, focusing on the involvement of contemporary artists in the décor of the festival. Currently, he is also serving as a content fellow for SmartHistry.org; besides, he is working on a book project on a history of civic statuary in Kolkata, India.

Dr. Sanyal’s Fulbright-Nehru project is constructing a historical narrative across three phases of Kolkata’s civic statuary: the colonial commemoration of prominent men of the British Raj; the post-Independence celebration of the leaders of Indian freedom struggle; and the current populist trend of statues of cultural celebrities. This comparative inquiry of the three phases is tracing the evolving role of this genre of public images in shaping Kolkata’s visual and political landscapes. The aim is to locate points of overlap and divergence that illuminate the dual role of Kolkata’s public statues as both aesthetic markers and tools of political identity.

Anushka Kulkarni

Anushka Kulkarni is a PhD candidate in musicology at UC Davis. She holds a bachelor’s degree in music in vocal performance and music history from the University of Delaware. Her primary research interests are in 18th-century opera, Rabindra Sangeet, and postcolonial studies. Her dissertation, “The Empire Sings Back: Operatic Histories of British-Indian Colonial Encounter”, engages in a transnational study of both European opera and Bengali musical drama, and their intersections with the empire. Anushka’s research has been supported by the UC Davis Dean’s Graduate Summer Fellowship. In 2023, she was the recipient of a Critical Language Scholarship.

In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Anushka is conducting archival work at the National Library, the West Bengal State Archives, and Asiatic Society, all situated in Kolkata, as well as at the Rabindra Bhavan Library and Archives in Santiniketan. This archival research will contribute to her dissertation on opera and British-Indian colonial encounter in 19th- and 20th-century Calcutta. Her work is also examining the complex and often contradictory representations of coloniality in musical drama. Besides, she is accessing primary source material on the presence and reception of Italian opera in 19th-century Calcutta as well as on the musical drama, or gitinatya, of the Bengali polymath, Rabindranath Tagore.

Joseph Engmark

Joseph Engmark is pursuing his PhD in mathematical statistics from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland. His research interests focus on design-based probability sample surveys. Since 2018, Joseph has been working in the Center for Statistical Research and Methodology at the U.S. Census Bureau. Prior to joining the bureau, he taught mathematics at secondary schools in Liberia and Malawi as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer. Joseph has a broad interest in nature, cultural exchange, and the global community.

Under the Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, John is collaborating with researchers at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata. The research project is focusing on capture-recapture methods, a survey sampling technique used to estimate totals in a finite population. These methods are widely used in practice, including in epidemiology, wildlife conservation, and official statistics, such as a census.