Host City USA: New Delhi

Laila Durrani

Ms. Laila Noor Durrani is a recent graduate of Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts. She was born in New York City, and is of Indian origin. She holds a BA in Mathematics and Government, with a focus on global political systems. She has worked for a number of non-profit organizations in northern India, particularly those who work to address gaps in the country’s educational infrastructures, and to improve women’s access to education. Ms. Durrani is interested in the intersections between political conflict and gender disparities, and the ways that political violence often disproportionately infringe upon women’s freedoms and rights, in India, and globally. After her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Ms. Durrani hopes to attend graduate school for further her studies in Public Policy and Government, continuing to build upon her academic interests.

Through her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Ms. Durrani is investigating the effects of COVID-19 on India’s education systems, examining how the pandemic has exacerbated gender disparities in the realm of educational access, particularly within regions of India which have historically experienced political violence or instability. Ms. Durrani is working with the Observer Research Foundation as well as a number of education-focused non-profit organizations to write a series of proposals to inform future policy with regard to educational access.

Christopher Chacon

Mr. Christopher Leo Chacon is a sixth year History PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and works on early twentieth century Hindu political thought under his doctoral advisor, Dr. Vinayak Chaturvedi. Specifically, he is interested in how Hindu anticolonialism and intellectualism fostered innovative conceptions of history and social reform during the last decades of colonial India as well as for the global Indian community. He is a California State University Chancellor’s Doctoral Incentive Program scholar and has received numerous awards for writing and research. He was an AIIS Language fellow in 2018-2019 and studied Hindi in Jaipur, India. He was also the 2016 Southern California Regional Conference of Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society Best Graduate Paper Award recipient for their world history category.

Mr. Chacon enjoys facilitating discussions on history as a Teaching Assistant, a position he has held since 2017. While at UCI, he has guest lectured on topics ranging from ancient world history to Indian religions. A native of Orange County, he received his bachelor’s degree in Anthropology, History, and Religious Studies and his master’s degree in History from California State University, Fullerton in 2013 and 2016 respectively. While speaking on behalf of his graduating class in 2013, Mr. Chacon underscored his belief in a holistic approach to the humanities as well as dedicated himself to mentoring future young scholars as he began his graduate career. He has kept that promise by pursuing several certificate programs at his university centered on mentorship and currently leads a writing group for his department. Mr. Chacon will graduate in 2023 and, after completing his Mellon postdoctoral teaching appointment at UCI, pursue a career in either academics or the federal government. He will be the first in his family to receive a PhD. In his spare time, he enjoys watching films and bowling with family and friends.

Mr. Chacon’s Fulbright-Nehru project is an investigation into the transnational works of Lajpat Rai and Bhai Parmanand in order to reconstruct of one of the most consequential and influential sociopolitical movements of the 20th century—Hindu intellectualism. Through the lens of the relatively new and innovative field of global intellectual history, Mr. Chacon focuses on the writings of Parmanand and Rai so as to argue that their ideas were essential to the development of global Hindu intellectualism. Mr. Chacon has compiled evidence that strongly suggests their transnational experiences shaped Hindu intellectualism, which in turn contributed to worldbuilding before and after independence.

Devendra Sharma

Dr. Devendra Sharma, is a Professor of Communication and Performance at California State University-Fresno. He is also a seventh-generation performer of Swang, Nautanki, and Raaslila, the traditional musical theater genres of northern India. He has given more than 1000 performances worldwide and has acted in and directed many films and television programs. His ancestors made “Rahas” musical theatre popular at Awadh’s Nawab (King) Wajid Ali Shah’s court in the mid 1800s. Dr. Sharma’s artistic mission is to use the indigenous performing arts to bring critical attention to contemporary global issues.

In 2021, Dr. Sharma received the largest commission in the traditional arts ever in the US from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to create a contemporary Nautanki opera. In 2010, he was invited by the world-famous Théâtre du Soleil in Paris to train French actors in Nautanki. His directed musical, “Hanuman Ki Ramayan” was premiered at Prithvi Theater in Mumbai, completing its 100 shows in August 2018. Dr. Sharma introduced Swang-Nautanki to America and Europe, where he created a Nautanki troupe, and has directed many productions.

Dr. Sharma has written numerous book chapters and journal articles. His forthcoming book titled, Nautanki: The Musical Theatre of North India will be published by Bloomsbury Publishing, England in 2023. His latest article comparing Ramlila and Nautanki was published in Asian Theatre Journal in 2021. Dr. Sharma has been a Visiting Professor/ Artist in Residence at institutions across the world such as University of Oxford, Columbia University, University of California-Berkeley, Film and Television Institute of India, and Banaras Hindu University, among many others.

In 2007-08, Dr. Sharma was the Chief Creative Consultant to the United Nations Joint Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) in India. In this capacity, he designed a folk media communication campaign to spread awareness on HIV/AIDS. From 1999-2004, he helped Johns Hopkins University Center for Communication Programs to create a massive folk media campaign for women’s empowerment and health in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. As part of the campaign, Dr. Sharma trained more than 150 folk troupes to stage more than 10,000 folk performances. His artistic website is www.devnautanki.com.

Swang-Nautanki (north India’s traditional opera) is dying along with its “akhārās” (community-based competitive performance groups) due to the media invasion. The goal of Dr. Sharma’s Fulbright-Nehru project is to achieve the urgently-needed documentation of Swang-Nautanki akhārās, hand-written and published scripts, performances, and the aging master-performers. His research also aims to understand how Swang-Nautanki is functioning as a communication medium for Indian villagers in the 21st century. To understand this, Dr. Sharma intends to collaborate with the local community in Mathura and the areas nearby to encourage a local troupe to create a Swang-Nautanki performance piece on a contemporary issue of their choice.

Aman Luthra

Dr. Aman Luthra is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the George Washington University in Washington, DC where he teaches courses in political ecology, development geography, and the geography of South Asia. Prior to this position, Dr. Luthra taught in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, MI. Dr. Luthra received his PhD from the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering at the John Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. His research primarily focuses on the changing landscape of labor and capital in the waste management sector in urban India, with a particular focus on informal workers in this industry. In addition to research on urban waste management, Dr. Luthra is also involved in an inter- and transdisciplinary collaborative project using citizen science to understand changing patterns of pollinator diversity and abundance in and around apple orchards in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Dr. Luthra has published articles in several leading journals in geography including Antipode, Geographical Review, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space and Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.

Dr. Luthra’s Fulbright-Nehru project proposes to examine the changing nature of work in the informal recycling economy in urban Indian using mixed methods including surveys and interviews with traditional kabariwalas (buyers of recyclable materials) and new firms that that use digital technologies to try and stake a claim in this market space. In addition to contributing to scholarship on the increasing ‘platformization’ of services, Fulbright’s support for this research will not only contribute to the development of evidence-based policy prescriptions in India, it will also allow the researcher to learn from, contribute to and build long- lasting relationships at Ambedkar University, Delhi.

Elizabeth Kadetsky

Ms. Elizabeth Kadetsky is a journalist, essayist, and fiction writer whose work often explores uses of memory and the filters of perception that can influence, distort and protect it. Her explorations into nostalgia have led her to an interest in the layered significances around the topics of antiquities and patrimony. Her most recent book, The Memory Eaters, released in March 2020 and winner of the Juniper Prize in Creative Nonfiction, was featured in The Boston Globe, LA Review of Books, and The Rumpus and was named a top pandemic read by Buzzfeed. Her essays and short stories have been chosen for a Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and two Best American Short Stories notable citations, and they have appeared in The New York Times, Antioch Review, Gettysburg Review, the Nation, and elsewhere. Her other books include two works of fiction and the hybrid work of memoir and reportage First There Is a Mountain, published by Little, Brown in 2004 and re-released as an e-book by Dzanc Books in 2019. The latter came out of Ms. Kadetsky’s research as a student Fulbrighter to India during the first of her two previous Fulbright grants. She is an Associate Professor of Fiction and Nonfiction at Penn State University and a Nonfiction Editor at New England Review.

Ms. Kadetsky’s narrative nonfiction Fulbright-Nehru project follows the story of a set of Gupta era sapta matrika sculptures and their theft, export, and recognition as objects of exquisite beauty on the world stage. A work of general nonfiction, the research investigates what became of missing members of the set of sculptures, stolen from a temple in Rajasthan in 1956. A work of archival research, travel writing, history, reflection, investigative journalism, and creative nonfiction, Ms. Kadetsky’s project and its original research uses her lens as a mother and daughter to explore the layered significance of the sculptures’ journey(s) in the context of international calls for the restitution and repatriation of stolen artworks.

Boaz Atzili

Dr. Boaz Atzili is an Associate Professor at the School of International Service of American University in Washington DC. He holds a PhD in Political Science from MIT and a BA from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Before coming to AU Dr. Atzili held a post-doctoral fellowship in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government in Harvard University. His research focuses on territorial conflicts and peace, the politics of borders and borderlands, the security aspects of state weakness, and deterrence and coercion. He published two books, Good Fences Bad Neighbors: Border Fixity and International Conflict (University of Chicago Press: 2012), and Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States that Host Nonstate Actors (Columbia University Press: 2018, with Wendy Perlman), as well as edited Territorial Designs and International Politics (Routledge: 2018, with Burak Kaderchan). His articles have been published, among other venues, in International Security, Security Studies, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, International Studies Review, and Territory, Politics, Governance.

Among other awards, Dr. Atzili’s work has gained the 2006 Edger E. Furniss Award for the best first book in international security from the Mershon Center for International Security, and the Kenneth N. Waltz Prize for the best 2006 dissertation in the area of security studies, from the American Political Science Association.

Dr. Atzili’s current project focuses on borderlands and buffer zones. He is interested in the way in which the interaction between center and periphery in borderlands affect interstate relations at the border, and the way international relations affect center-periphery relations within the borderlands. The project includes quantitative and qualitative components and an inter-regional comparison of South Asia and the Middle East.

India inherited from its British colonialists the notion that modern nation-state’s sovereignty stretches uniformly up to a country’s borders. But it also inherited a reality in which the presence of the state in its remote mountainous borderlands was very scarce. Dr. Atzili’s Fulbright-Nehru project seeks an investigation of center-periphery relations in the Indian borderlands with China and Nepal in Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, and Ladakh. Through archival research and interviews, the research aims to advance our understanding of the role of center-periphery interaction in shaping perceptions, policies, and realities in the western Himalayas, at the edge of the Indian state.

Lavanya Nott

Lavanya Nott is a PhD student in geography at UCLA. She has a master’s degree in South Asia studies from Cornell University and a bachelor’s in English literature and mathematics from Bryn Mawr College. She has worked in organizing and research in the area of labor rights in both India and the U.S., most recently, with an organization in Bengaluru on the working conditions in export-oriented manufacturing industries in South India. In the past, her research has been supported by Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, and UCLA-administered grants.

Outside of research, Lavanya is an avid baker and cook, and enjoys playing football with a local club and spending time with her dog, Abacus.

Lavanya’s Fulbright research is exploring past and current projects on food sovereignty in postcolonial India and their entanglements with anti-imperialist internationalist currents across the Third World. Her study is particularly on how struggles around food sovereignty have transformed in response to neoliberalism, and how they relate to broader questions of political and economic sovereignty in the postcolonial world.

Maria Loyd

Ms. Maria Loyd teaches English at Vel Phillips Memorial High School in Madison, Wisconsin, where she has taught mostly juniors and seniors for six years. There, she has served as a teacher leader, leading teachers in both her department and school in anti-racist educational practices and policies. She has also worked on curriculum development and has piloted a course focused on experiential learning. Her work in educational equity and innovative teaching and learning has helped Ms. Loyd to see that the connection between these two fields is natural and necessary: innovative instructional approaches, such as experiential learning, are key to addressing disparities in education. This ignited Ms. Loyd’s keen interest in studying new approaches to teaching and learning that can have a positive impact on the most marginalized communities around the globe. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in social, historical, and philosophical foundations of education from Florida State University.

Ms. Loyd’s Fulbright inquiry project is exploring innovative teaching methods in India, focusing specifically on how these new approaches are undertaken and what effect they are having on changing educational outcomes. Her research is attempting to support the creation of a framework to aid teachers in implementing innovative educational approaches. This framework will include standards, model curricula, and an evaluation component – all vital entities that can have a direct impact on learning.

Frances Walker

Frances Walker has a bachelor’s in anthropology (medical) from Princeton University, New Jersey, with minors in global health and health policy; gender, sex, and sexuality; and African American studies. After graduating in 2022 as a Princeton University Henry R. Labouisse ’26 Fellow, Frances worked on the ground with Humans for Humanity, an Indian NGO, on its menstrual health and wellness campaigns and projects. Her current research work is a continuation of her previous senior thesis research titled “Deconstructing Menstruation in India: From Stigma to Visibility in Non-Governmental Organizations”, on historical stigma and taboo regarding menstruation and their contemporary consequences for menstruators in India.

Prior to working and researching in India, Frances served as the assistant manager of Semicolon Bookstore in Chicago where she organized literature-based community service events benefiting hundreds of Chicago kids; she also curated speaking engagements for authors. As a student, Frances was the president of the Princeton Women’s Rugby Football Club and served on its alumni board, as well as worked as a Princeton Writing Center Fellow to help undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty with a variety of academic-writing projects. She also served as a multi-year volunteer at Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center in the emergency medicine and orthopedics departments. Frances is still an avid fan of rugby and plays it in her free time. Outside of this, she loves trekking, traveling, and trying new foods.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Frances is seeking to further understand the current shift in India towards more sustainable and eco-friendly menstruation products. For this, she is locating the key actors in the realm of sustainable menstruation in order to determine why and how these products are marketed, as well as to understand what drives these entities to create change. She is also looking into the barriers that restrict the menstruators’ ability to switch to these products, and also examining the consequences of burgeoning menstrual waste as the majority of India’s population moved to using sanitary napkins in the last 10 years.

Anya Wahal

Anya Wahal is a recent graduate of Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service where she majored in science, technology, and international affairs, and concentrated in energy and the environment. She is a Taiwanese-Indian-American researcher and activist dedicated to conserving the earth’s water resources and safeguarding the marginalized communities disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis. Beyond research, Anya has interned at the State Department, Census Bureau, Library of Congress, World Wildlife Fund, and Council on Foreign Relations.

During her time in college, Anya devoted herself to mentorship, research, and service. She was a meditation leader and first-year retreat leader, as well as a fellow at the Georgetown Women’s Alliance and a sister of the Delta Phi Epsilon professional foreign service sorority. Besides, she is a Carroll Fellow, Pelosi Scholar, and Krogh Scholar. Anya co-founded The Polling Place, a nonpartisan, youth-led nonprofit dedicated to providing information on elections nationwide, as well as of Pick It Up, an educational initiative on the Earth Challenge App that enables universities to track plastic waste. In her free time, Anya enjoys taking nature photographs, exploring new coffee shops, and visiting museums.

For her Fulbright-Nehru research project, in order to better understand how poor water quality is disproportionately impacting Indian mothers, Anya is conducting environmental anthropology and policy research in New Delhi, with the aim of answering the question: what is the relationship between the inclusion of low-income mothers in water quality policy and mothers’ lived experiences in New Delhi? Anya is combining semi-structured in-depth interviews with media analysis and participant observation to learn how mothers are discussed in relation to the water crisis; she is also investigating policies on water quality.