Pune Archives - Page 2 of 2

Christian Novetzke

Prof. Christian Novetzke received a BA from Macalester College, an MTS from Harvard University, and a PhD from Columbia University. Prof. Novetzke is Professor of South Asia Studies, Religious Studies, and Global Studies at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He is also Professor of the Comparative History of Ideas at UW. Prof. Novetzke’s books include The Quotidian Revolution (Columbia University Press 2016) and Religion and Public Memory (Columbia University Press 2008). He is also the co-author (with Andy Rotman and William Elison) of Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation (Harvard University Press 2016) and co-editor (with Jack Hawley and Swapna Sharma) Of Bhakti and Power (University of Washington Press 2019). Among his awards, Prof. Novetzke was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018 and a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow in 2013. His current projects include a book on yoga as political theory and practice with co-author Sunila S. Kale (under contract at Columbia University Press) and a book on the thought of Savitribai Phule, for which he was awarded the current Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship.

Savitribai Phule was born into an impoverished subaltern caste of Shudra agricultural workers in India in 1831. She became one of the first Shudra women in India to receive an education. She authored two books of political poetry in Marathi, each articulating her powerful vision for social justice and her fight against caste patriarchy. Her ideas about religion, caste, gender, and power made her one of the most important critical thinkers in Indian history. However, Savitribai Phule is hardly known outside of India. With Fulbright-Nehru’s support Prof. Novetzke hopes to complete his research on a book on the critical thought of Savitribai Phule.

Gokul Sampath

Gokul Sampath is a doctoral student in the International Development Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research broadly centers on understanding and overcoming barriers to safe and reliable water access to all in the developing world. Currently, Gokul’s work focuses on strategies to address exposure to dangerous drinking water contaminants in rural India, especially arsenic in groundwater.

Prior to joining MIT, Gokul worked as a senior research associate at Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), running randomized evaluations to measure the effectiveness of programs to reduce groundwater consumption in the drought-prone areas of western India. Gokul was a Fulbright-Nehru Student Researcher from 2014–2015 at A.N. College in Patna, Bihar. He completed his MA in Middle East, South Asian, and African studies at Columbia University, and his BS at the University of California, Davis.

Arsenic in groundwater is a major public health threat in eastern India. Lakhs of rural households are at elevated risk of cancer, stroke, and heart disease from exposure to arsenic in their primary drinking water source: the handpump tube wells on their home premises. Gokul’s Fulbright research is focusing on the social determinants of arsenic exposure in rural West Bengal. He is seeking to explain why households might choose an unsafe water source even when safe alternatives exist in their communities. By better understanding the constraints and norms that shape water-fetching decisions, he hopes to highlight ways to reduce arsenic exposure.

Priyamvada Nambrath

Priya Nambrath is a doctoral candidate in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation research focuses on the applied practice of mathematics and astronomy in the sociocultural life of medieval and pre-modern Kerala. More broadly, she is interested in the intellectual and scientific history of India with a focus on cultural encounters, archaic modernisms, patronage, and pedagogy. Language and literature, textual culture, and visual art constitute additional related areas of her focus. She is also interested in folk traditions of art and knowledge in South India, and the ocean-facing histories of the region.

Priya brings her previous training and work experience in science and mathematics to her current research interests in Indian scientific and educational history. She has taught university courses in Sanskrit and Malayalam language and literature and has published a translation of a Sanskrit play. She has also been a highly successful coach for competitive mathematics at the school level.

Under the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Priya is researching the pedagogical approaches and cultural concerns that shaped the mathematical culture of South India in the pre-colonial and early colonial periods, with a focus on the Kerala school of Indian mathematics. She is conducting archival research on untranslated mathematical materials composed both in Sanskrit and in the vernacular languages. Priya hopes that her research will contribute to increasing awareness about a plurality of scientific traditions and pedagogical strategies which can be profitably utilized in modern classrooms.

Aruna Kharod

Aruna Kharod is an ethnomusicology PhD candidate at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. She holds an MMus in ethnomusicology (2021) as well as a dual BA in Hindi language and literature and South Asian studies, all from UT Austin. Aruna’s doctoral dissertation examines transnational exchanges and histories of the sitar-making industry. Her research has been published in the International Journal of Traditional Arts and has been generously supported by the Smithsonian Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology, the Presser Foundation, Texas Folklife, and UT Austin’s most prestigious doctoral research award, the Donald D. Harrington Dissertation Fellowship (2022–23).

As a performing artist, Aruna is trained in Hindustani music and bharatanatyam dance. She studied sitar under the guidance of Professor Emeritus Stephen Slawek, a senior disciple of the late Pandit Ravi Shankar. She is currently under the training of renowned sitarist Vidushi Sahana Banerjee. Aruna teaches and performs bharatanatyam in central Texas as part of her guru, Dr. Sreedhara Akkihebbalu’s Kaveri Natya Yoga School of Bharatanatyam. She has also studied bharatanatyam and odissi intensively in India. Besides, Aruna has performed and taught Javanese gamelan for over five years.

Aruna is an ethnographic storyteller who is passionate about intergenerational and community-based work. Her notable projects include leading a project on Partition Songs in the Indian-American diaspora (2021); being involved in a digital humanities resource program on American sitar-making (2022); and being part of a mentorship programming series for women PhD students (2023). Aruna is also a photographer and budding documentary maker who focuses on hereditary and traditional luthiers and artists in the U.S. and India, as well as on intergenerational South Asian-American life. As an arts educator, Aruna leads and develops programming for audiences in public libraries, schools, senior centers, and museums around central Texas. She has worked as an artist-in-residence (Blanton Museum of Art, 2017), public outreach and programming liaison (Humanities Texas, 2021), and as a qualitative research consultant (Jugal’s Literature Festival, 2023).

Aruna’s Fulbright-Nehru project is studying sitar performance through individualized, immersive, traditional taalim, or training, under the tutelage of Vidushi Sahana Banerjee. She is also practicing the nuances of improvisatory techniques and musical theory as rooted in Banerjee’s distinctive interpretation of the Rampur Senia gharana.

Akshali Gandhi

Akshali Gandhi is a senior transportation planner for King County Metro in Seattle, Washington. In this capacity, she has worked on bus-stop improvements, capital planning, parking policy, mobility hubs, and bicycle/pedestrian paths across the Puget Sound region. Earlier, Akshali was a consultant for Nelson\Nygaard’s Washington, D.C. office and a transportation planner for the City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In total, she has seven years of professional work experience in the transportation planning field.

Akshali holds a bachelor’s degree in community and regional planning from Iowa State University and a master’s degree in city and regional planning from Cornell University. She is Indian American and has published research on economic development challenges along commercial corridors in immigrant neighborhoods, with a focus on Devon Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. Akshali is passionate about pedestrian safety, street design, and urban mobility for vulnerable users.

Traffic fatalities are a leading cause of death among young people in India. As a transportation professional, Gandhi is interested in researching the role street design and public space interventions play in road safety for infants, children, and caregivers. A new program in Pune retrofits urban streets into pedestrian zones for children to walk, bike, and play. For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Akshali is conducting a public life study of selected road safety projects to monitor how children and caregivers use such street interventions. Working with the Institute for Transportation Development and Policy India (ITDP India), she is compiling her findings into a case study and toolkit of best practices to share with planners and policymakers.

Lauren Bausch

Prof. Lauren Bausch teaches at Dharma Realm Buddhist University, located in the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Ukiah, California. A specialist in the philosophy of the Brāhmaṇa texts, she is interested in exploring the relationship between Vedic tradition and early Indian Buddhism. She is the editor of Self, Sacrifice, and Cosmos: Vedic Thought, Ritual, and Philosophy (2019) and has written articles such as “The Kāṇva Brāhmaṇas and Buddhists in Kosala”, “Philosophy of Language in the Ṛgveda”, and “Bráhman as the Absolute in Late Brāhmaṇa Texts”. She completed her PhD in Sanskrit from the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2015.

Including a life-changing undergraduate semester in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Delhi and three semesters of dissertation fieldwork at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Prof. Bausch has been to India to study languages, conduct research, deliver lectures, and to volunteer. She has given invited lectures at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, the National Museum, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Savitribai Phule Pune University. She received the first annual International Association of Sanskrit Studies’ Honorary Research Fellowship in 2019 and organized a Vedic conference at Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune.

Prof. Bausch looks forward to building a community of scholars and practitioners that facilitates collaboration among Vedic and Buddhist specialists in the United States and India. She hopes that the book resulting from this Fulbright-Nehru research touches its readers by revealing something about their roots and will also give scholars of Hinduism a more comprehensive understanding of Vedic tradition and scholars of Buddhism a sound basis for understanding the cultural background of Gotama’s teachings.

Prof. Bausch’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the philosophy of language and causality that is articulated in middle and late Vedic texts. She is identifying and examining the discourses within these texts around the nature of man and the absolute creating itself to experience relativity, while situating the philosophy of the Brāhmaṇa texts in the intellectual history of India. Rather than interpreting ritual activity through the lens of Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta, her research is probing the cosmologies, mythologies, and explanatory connections found throughout the Brāhmaṇa texts themselves. The results are expected to shed more light on the relationship between late Vedic thought and early Buddhism.

Robert Pennock

Dr. Robert Pennock is University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University where he is on the faculty of Lyman Briggs College, the departments of philosophy, computer science, and engineering, and the ecology, evolution, and behavior program. He received a BA with honors in philosophy and biology from Earlham College in 1980 and a PhD in history and philosophy of science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1991. His research involves both empirical and philosophical questions that relate to evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and the scientific character virtues. He was an expert witness in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Board intelligent design creationism case. He also develops software to help students learn about evolution and the nature of science using digital organisms. He is a co-founder of BEACON, an NSF Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, and he also directs the Vocational Virtues Project. He is the principal investigator (PI) of the VERITIES Initiative, which aims to implement a virtue-based approach to RCR (responsible conduct of research) training at scale; he is also the PI of the largest national study of the scientific ethical mindset. Dr. Pennock is a senior fellow and a past president of Sigma Xi and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His book Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. His latest book is An Instinct for Truth: Curiosity and the Moral Structure of Science.

In his Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Pennock is conducting a small-scale replication of his sociological/philosophical study of scientists’ views about the character virtues that are important for scientific research. These data will help gain an understanding about the scientific mindset and what scientific values are shared across cultures. Aspects of this idea of the scientific mindset were anticipated by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru’s notion of “scientific temper” and this project is exploring that connection philosophically and empirically. He is also giving talks and leading workshops on scientific virtue and responsible conduct of research for graduate students and faculty.

Beena (Veena) Howard

Dr. Beena (Veena) Howard is professor of Asian religious traditions in the Department of Philosophy at California State University, Fresno. She holds the Endowed Chair in Jain and Hindu Dharma, and also serves as the director of the M.K. Gandhi Center: Inner Peace and Sarvodaya. Her publications include the books Gandhi’s Global Legacy: Moral Methods and Moral Challenges (ed., Lexington, 2023); The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy and Gender (ed., Bloomsbury, 2019); Dharma, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and Sikh Traditions of India (ed., I.B. Tauris, 2017); and Gandhi’s Ascetic Activism: Renunciation and Social Action (SUNY Press, 2013). She has also authored numerous peer-reviewed articles, including “The Nonviolence Conundrum: Political Peace and Personal Karma in Jain and Hindu Traditions”; “Nonviolence as Love in Action: James Lawson’s Transforming the Promise of Jesus’ Love into a Practical Force for Change”; “Divine Light and Melodies Lead the Way: The Santmat Tradition of Bihar”; “Lessons from ‘The Hawk and the Dove’: Reflections on the Mahābhārata’s Animal Parables and Ethical Predicaments”; and “Rethinking Gandhi’s Celibacy: Ascetic Power and the Empowerment of Women”. Notably, she has served on the Board of Trustees of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Dr. Howard is also a TEDx speaker.

Using philosophical and textual approaches and women and gender studies theories, Dr. Howard’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is seeking to create a conversation with the Jain advocates of women’s equality and education, Shrimad Rajchandra (1867–1901) and Virchand Gandhi (1864–1901), while studying the life and work of the female Jain activist, Mridula Sarabhai (1911–1973). Born in a distinguished family, Sarabhai adopted an austere life, defied patriarchal norms, and made heroic efforts to rehabilitate abducted Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim women in violence-stricken areas. Through archival resources, engagement with faculty and students at the International School of Jain Studies and local universities, as well as through interviews with the Sarabhai family and Jain female leaders and followers, Dr. Howard is seeking to further the questions of women’s struggle against gender bias and violence.