Host City USA: Kolkata

Mary (Dyan) McGuire

Dr. Mary (Dyan) McGuire is the director of the criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) programs at Saint Louis University (SLU). She also founded and directs the CCJ BA and JD program at SLU. She holds a JD from the Georgetown University Law Center and a PhD in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Prior to entering academia, she worked as a judicial clerk for the first female justice of the Missouri Supreme Court. She has also worked as an assistant attorney general for the State of Missouri and as an associate with Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal.

Dr. McGuire is a committed educator. She has received numerous teaching prizes, including the Emerson Excellence in Teaching Award and was recently named the Reichmann Professor for Excellence in Teaching at SLU. She has been spearheading efforts at inclusive, multicultural education at SLU and has developed a number of classes on the subject, including “Multiculturalism for CJ Professionals”. Her research interests involve the intersection of law and practice, systemic race and gender bias as well as violence that impacts women. Her work has been published extensively in peer-reviewed journals like the Journal of Criminal Justice and Law, Gender Issues, and Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health.

Dr. McGuire’s Fulbright-Nehru project is designed to expand students’ understanding of the problem of gender bias as manifested in social structures like the legal system and social arrangements like patriarchy and how these circumstances facilitate acts of violence and oppression against women and girls. As part of the project, she is teaching three classes at the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata: “Women’s Rights and International Law”; Understanding Serial Killers through Criminology”; and “Violence Against Women”. All three classes focus on gender equity, violence against women, and/or the social construction of crime, and is intended to expand, especially in the context of domestic and international legal systems, her students’ understanding of social forces influencing the lived experiences of women and girls.

Liesl Schwabe

Ms. Liesl Schwabe is a writer and educator. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders, and LitHub. She was awarded the 2020 Donald Murray Prize and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Ms. Schwabe has been a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar and was a scholar associate at the Institute of Language Studies and Research Kolkata, where she facilitated writing workshops for the faculty and graduate students. In 2024, she was named an English Language Specialist by the U.S. Department of State. Formerly the director of the Writing Program at Yeshiva College, she currently oversees the Writing Center and the Writing Across the Curriculum program at Berkshire Community College. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars.

The teaching portion of Ms. Schwabe’s Fulbright-Nehru project involves setting up writing workshops for undergraduate and graduate students; it is also working on the professional development of the faculty interested in integrating more writing instruction into their classes. For the research portion of this project, she is writing a collection of essays that explore specific instances of U.S. and Indian interactions – artistic, environmental, and social. The cornerstone essay is focusing on the play, Maanusher Adhikare (The Rights of Man), written and performed in Bengali in 1968, which is on the 1930s trials of the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama. Blending personal narrative, historical context, and contemporary reporting, the collection is about the limitations and possibilities of solidarity, while illuminating upon interdependence and shared humanity.

Ultimately, Ms. Schwabe hopes to establish a writing and research center in Kolkata which will serve as a resource for a consortium of public universities, with its workshops and one-on-one support for student and faculty, along with research and publication. She believes that writing centers help foster curiosity and exchange of ideas, on the page, around the campus, and in the world.

Mainak Mookherjee

Dr. Mainak Mookherjee obtained his BSc (1997) from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and his MSc (1999) from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai. He went on to earn his PhD (2003) from the University of Cambridge. He moved to the U.S. in 2003 for postdoctoral research at the University of Michigan (2003–2005) and Yale University (2006–2008). Dr. Mookherjee then joined Bayreisches Geoinstitut, Bayreuth, Germany, as a visiting researcher in 2008. He returned to the U.S. in 2012 as a research scientist at Cornell University. Since 2015, Dr. Mookherjee has been a faculty member at Florida State University. In 2019, he was tenured and promoted from assistant to associate professor, and in 2024, to full professor.

Dr. Mookherjee’s primary research interest lies in understanding the processes that occur in the Earth’s interior. He uses a combination of experimental methods and complementary numerical simulations to understand the cycling/exchange of volatiles such as hydrogen/water and carbon dioxide between the Earth’s exosphere and its interior.

Geophysical observations have often indicated a presence of low viscosity channel which explains the southward extrusion of the Himalaya. The likely cause of this low viscosity channel is partial melting. In his Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Mookherjee is examining whether Himalayan crustal rocks contain trace quantities of water. This will help Earth scientists to gain insight into collisional dynamics and volatile cycling. He is also attempting to constrain the water contents in nominally anhydrous minerals of Himalayan crustal rocks. In addition, he is providing constraints to the physical properties of water-bearing melts which will enable geophysicists to test the low viscosity channel hypothesis.

Devin Creed

Devin Creed is a PhD candidate in South Asian history at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. 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. 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.

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

Devin’s Fulbright-Hays project is analyzing how South Asians contributed to, contested, and adapted nascent forms of Western humanitarianism, in the process forming hybrid cultures of care and charity. Concurrently, he is examining the arrival of modern nutrition science as a developmental technology of colonial governance which clashed with indigenous foodways. The phrase “giving for eating” highlights his novel approach to the study of famines; this approach combines an archaeology of annadana and other food-gifting practices with a material analysis of famine foods. This turn to the alimentary allows him to show the ways in which endemic famine became constitutive of modern regimes of charity and foodways in South Asia. Devin is accomplishing this through studying archival materials in Bangla, Urdu, Hindi, and English, and by drawing on neo-materialist methods to recreate famine foods.