Host City USA: Sonipat

Elijah Roggen

Elijah Roggen is a 2025 graduate of Pomona College, where he received his BA in politics and religious studies. At Pomona, he won the Stauffacher Thesis Prize in Religious Studies. He is especially interested in the confluence of religious and modern political narratives in the Jewish context. Elijah has spent time as a summer camp counselor and programming director, as a reading tutor, a disaster relief volunteer, and as an elementary school classroom assistant. He grew up in Arlington, Virginia.

Elijah’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the nuances of political identity among India’s Jewish communities, particularly the Bene Israel community in the decades preceding and following Indian independence. The project emerges from an interest in family history – Elijah’s grandfather is a Bene Israel Jew born in Fort Kochi and raised in Mumbai. Through interviews and archival work, the project is seeking to fill a gap in the literature by considering the seemingly opposed political positions of Bene Israel individuals in the late colonial era and various forms of political dissent.

Shekha Kotak

Shekha Kotak is a sixth year PhD candidate in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. She works on the intersection of caste, translation studies, and the history of emotions. She completed her bachelor’s in English literature from Rutgers University, New Jersey. Shekha has over nine years of tutoring and teaching experience. She has taught a range of subjects such as K-12 English and history, college-level research writing, SAT and TOEFL English, and beginner’s English to immigrant children. As part of her PhD requirements, Shekha has taught bachelor’s courses on topics such as Buddhism and Asian studies. She is also an avid translator, translating from and into Gujarati, Hindi, and English. Her translation of the Dalit author Ajay Navaria’s short story is forthcoming in the Granta magazine. When not immersed in academic research, Shekha spends time reading novels, literary magazines and blogs, and occasionally writing on various subjects.

Shekha’s Fulbright-Nehru research is focusing on emotive world-making in Hindi and Gujarati Dalit literatures and in their English translations. The research is delving into both print and digital literary canons, and studying Dalit texts across languages and media to reveal the critical language of emotions and the range of feelings they generate. Shekha’s work is attempting to heed the call of Dalit authors who urge for a different paradigm of literary aesthetics to critically engage with Dalit literature – they are not in favor of emotions such as grief, fear, love, joy, and rage being taken for granted, but advocates for interpreting Dalit interiority in literary writings through the lens of Dalit pain and consciousness.

Walsh Kern

Walsh Kern is a 2025 graduate of Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. He previously worked as an intern in Washington, D.C., in both the U.S. Senate and the Department of the Interior, where his work primarily focused on renewable energy policy. He developed an interest in Indian politics while working as a research assistant for Professor Aseema Sinha who was studying Indian welfare schemes.

Walsh’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is exploring the question: how are India’s international renewable energy commitments implemented at the subnational level? He is particularly interested in understanding the motivations behind state climate action and examining how policies vary across states. His research is focusing on the state governments of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh to analyze this variation. The aim is to identify the driving forces behind state-level renewable energy policy in order to offer valuable insights into this critical policy landscape. Since renewable energy collaboration is a major component of the U.S.-India relationship, his research will also contribute to a deeper understanding of India’s transition towards green energy.

Alexa Russo

Ms. Alexa Russo is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her PhD project analyzes the growing farmer producer organization/cooperative and sustainable agriculture movements in India, focusing on the role of gender in the imagining and formations of rural economic futures. Ms. Russo began her studies at Amherst College where she received a BA in Economics and Religion (with honors) in 2012. While studying abroad in Bodh Gaya and Banaras, Ms. Russo completed an ethnographic project of worshippers of Hanuman and Sri Lankan pilgrims, and after graduation, co-authored “A Dream Experiment in Development Economics” in the Journal of Economic Education.

Ms. Russo subsequently received a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, in which she conducted ethnographic research of women’s self-help groups in a remote Rajasthani village. In preparation for the fellowship, Ms. Russo began Hindi language learning, and has continued for many years after, reaching a distinguished level of proficiency. After her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Ms. Russo worked for three years at J.P. Morgan where she acquired further insights into financial frameworks through analyses of socially motivated institutions as well as financial and non-financial companies. Ms. Russo then received an MSc in Gender (with Distinction) from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2017 and received the Best Performance Prize in her degree. In her master’s thesis, Ms. Russo analyzed how representations of women within a rural Gujarati embroidery cooperative are negotiated across globally circulating discourses on entrepreneurship and third-world “authenticity.” She later published her thesis in The Journal of Law, Social Justice and Global Development. After this program, Ms. Russo expanded her on-the-ground understanding of gender within NGO networks through her work in women’s rights advocacy at Rutgers University’s Center for Women’s Global Leadership. While on Stanford campus, Ms. Russo has been a committed student worker organizer, leading graduate student advocacy on affordable housing, childcare, and other critical services, as well as responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. For this work, Ms. Russo received the Stanford University’s 2020 Community Impact Award. She is an avid meditator and recreational yogi, and enjoys her new found hobby as a novice photographer.

Rural India currently faces intersecting economic and ecological crises that have also exacerbated social inequalities. In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Ms. Russo aims to analyze how various actors address India’s agrarian challenges through forms of sustainable agriculture, with the cooperative as a key structure of implementation, and women as pivotal agents of change. Ms. Russo aims to investigate how different actors envision sustainable agrarian futures in India as well as the practices and ideals of labor, gender, and sociality that constitute a sustainable cooperative. Her project also analyzes how political alignments, relationships, and positionality within policy networks shape and enable various agrarian imaginings.

Catherine Ralph

Ms. Catherine Ralph is an innovator, explorer, and collaborator with remarkable drive. She grew up in a small, coastal town in Maine before traveling to California for college where she learned to discover her identity outside of her upbringing. Throughout college, Ralph was exposed not only to new people but also to new experiences and avenues for eliciting positive change within her communities.

Ms. Ralph graduated from Santa Clara University with majors in Economics and Political Science because she was inspired by the connection they had to various realms of her life––e.g., her interest in social entrepreneurship and the role that social entrepreneurs have in solving unjust environmental equilibriums while simultaneously working to address social problems––and the duality that allowed her to showcase both her analytical and mathematical skills.

Through Santa Clara University’s Miller Center Fellowship, Ms. Ralph utilized her academic background in behavioral economics to draw larger conclusions about the impact gender interventions can have, and further, how strategy and policy proposals can maximize that impact. She used her analytical skills to develop a portfolio for Oorja Development Solutions––a social enterprise that finances and installs solar mini-grids in rural communities in Uttar Pradesh for irrigation, agro-processing, and cooling––to overcome hindrances to impact investment opportunities through gender-focused integration strategies.

Ms. Ralph was the President of Santa Clara’s outing club, Into the Wild (ITW). Ms. Ralph led with authenticity and pride for being part of such a spectacular organization that thrives off of participants’ awe when they round the corner into Yosemite Valley for the first time, or their giggles during the first night spent in a tent. ITW shapes students’ trajectories at Santa Clara through its ability to foster intimate communities that span beyond weekend trips.

Ms. Ralph defines success as having a community of friends, family, and mentors who comfort her during hardship, amplify her achievements, and challenge her to push her own boundaries.

Persistent cultural biases against fully including women in the formal economy have hindered economic development. Ms. Ralph’s Fulbright-Nehru research project aims to document the impact social enterprises bringing renewable energy by way of solar mini-grids to farms, have on social and gender attitudes in India. When social enterprises mirror the demographic of farmers, women’s employment increases, extending their individual agency and facilitating more progressive attitudes about gender. By harnessing the power of grassroots interventions, social enterprises will positively impact women’s agency and economic development. The broader impacts of Ms. Ralph’s research encourage social enterprises to implement gender interventions, to increase development and scaling potential.

Suraj Kushwaha

Mr. Suraj Kushwaha is a recent graduate of Princeton University, where he studied a self-designed curriculum for an independent major in Postcolonial Environmental Studies. His research interests center around South Asian languages, culture, and history. He has lived and studied in India for two years, first on Princeton’s Bridge Year Program in Varanasi and later on a Boren Scholarship for intensive Hindi language study in Jaipur and Mussoorie. He is especially interested in the Himalaya, its people, and the complex environmental, economic, and cultural conflicts that have arisen with the opening of this region to unprecedented numbers of pilgrims, tourists, and mountaineers through globalization and development. His research interests include the imperial legacy of Himalayan mountaineering and the role of mountaineering in the formation of an “Indian” identity. His senior thesis probed the role of local knowledge in the colonial exploration of the Himalaya and Tibet. He hopes to address the absence of local people’s and porters’ perspectives in the history of mountaineering by collaborating on oral history and ethnographic research alongside these communities.

After the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Mr. Kushwaha hopes to pursue graduate studies and a career as a professor. Outside of his studies, Mr. Kushwaha gravitates toward the remote, vertical environments of mountains near and far. As an avid climber and aspiring mountain guide, he views climbing as a transformative medium to connect with environment, self, and others. He is constantly pushing his own limits in climbing and helping others to break down barriers and do the same.

Mr. Kushwaha’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring and documenting the histories and lived experiences of porters working in India’s Central Himalayan Mountain tourism industry. By observing porters on their assignments and conducting interviews with consenting porters, he hopes to identify key issues facing porters in an evolving labor geography. The research seeks to address the omission of porters’ perspectives from the discourse on the legacy of imperialism in the Himalaya. Mr. Kushwaha hopes to highlight porters’ crucial role in a growing industry and understand the challenges they face as they navigate a nuanced labor niche inflected by a history of British imperial exploration.

Zachary Clark

Zachary Clark is a PhD candidate at Pennsylvania State University studying Late Qing and 20th-century Sino-Tibetan borderland history. Zachary received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Connecticut and then lived for over two years in Beijing, teaching English. He received his MA in Asia-Pacific studies from the University of San Francisco where he also worked at the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History. In the past two years, Zachary has been actively studying Chinese and Tibetan languages to gain a more nuanced and historical understanding of the ethnic and cultural diversity in China’s western regions.

Zachary’s research has its spotlight on the Sino-Tibetan borderland (today’s Tibet Autonomous Region, Qinghai, Sichuan, and Yunnan) from the Late Qing dynasty to the early 1950s. Within this region, he focuses on regional governance, sometimes designated as “warlordism”, which lasted for decades and navigated the governance of an ethnically diverse population of Tibetan, Han Chinese, Yi, and Hui Muslims amongst a radically shifting political landscape in both China and Tibet. His research bridges 20th-century Chinese and Tibetan history by foregrounding the interests, cultures, and ethnic groups prevalent in this borderland to better understand the early developments of nationalism, ethnicity, and identity outside of the central Chinese state.

In his free time, Zachary is a Premier League soccer enthusiast. He also enjoys hiking, watching Chinese and Tibetan films, and trying new Tibetan food recipes.

Zachary’s Fulbright-Hays project looks at the Sino-Tibetan region from 1905 to 1955, by focusing on three western provincial and regional capitals: Xining, Kangding, and Kunming. For this, he is using Chinese, English, and Tibetan sources to provide a more holistic, non-state view of the methods that regional government policies enacted on the periphery and the various Tibetan ethnic, political, and religious factors which shaped them. Zachary’s project argues that China’s far west, far from being politically irrelevant to the Chinese state, put forward new visons of modern state-making which shed light on the historical process of China’s transition from empire to nation state.

Nicholas Shafer

Nicholas Shafer is a current Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford and the Institute of Development Studies, where he is completing graduate courses in modern Middle Eastern studies, international development, and public policy. A former desk officer covering Yemen and the Gulf with the U.S. Agency for International Development, Nicholas has spent the past five years living and working across Europe, the Middle East, and in Washington, D.C. at the intersection of international development and foreign affairs from various vantage points, including the U.S. policy community, INGOs, and a fintech startup in London. His research principally examines the dynamics of rising powers in the international system, with a regional focus on the Middle East and Indian Ocean community. Nicholas has also written on the adoption and deployment of decentralized currencies in fragile state environments such as Lebanon.

A native of Silicon Valley and a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, with a BA in anthropology, Arabic, and public policy, Nicholas plans to continue into a career in foreign policy and public service. He is also a Boren Scholar and John Gardner Fellow; besides, he co-leads the mentorship program for the Community College Global Affairs Fellowship funded by the Gates Foundation which provides community college students with the resources and networks they need to reach their full potential in foreign affairs, public service, and the world of fellowships and scholarships.

For his Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, Nicholas is exploring the spectrum of opinions amongst Indian foreign policy actors on the utility of extra-regional alliances to achieving India’s foreign policy priorities in four key areas: energy security; food security; technology ecosystems; and national security. In a more contentious and complicated geopolitical environment, he is studying current and next-gen perspectives on alliances and approaches to foreign affairs to navigate the early 21st century. His project is also focusing explicitly on the emerging mini-lateral relationships and collaborations, including the I2U2 Group and the Quad, as well as on broader thinking within the Indian strategic planning community.

Caroline Bennet

Caroline Bennet is a scholar from Denver, Colorado. She recently graduated from Yale University with simultaneously awarded bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history. In her undergraduate degree, her focus lay on international security studies, diplomatic history, and urban history. She spent her graduate degree studying the history of the American Southwest. Caroline wrote her undergraduate thesis and her graduate dissertation on the history of Denver’s urban growth.

Caroline was a participant in Yale’s highly selective Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, which is aimed at addressing the large-scale and long-term strategic challenges of statecraft, politics, and social change. Through this program, she received a fellowship to research private-sector strategies for combating poverty, gender inequality, and environmental destruction in New Delhi.

At Yale, Caroline served as the director of Civic Education in Every Vote Counts, a student-led organization committed to making voting accessible to young people. She also worked for Gary Community Ventures, a Denver enterprise that mobilizes policy, philanthropy, and venture capital to address inequity and improve the lives of Colorado kids and families. While there, she helped design a high-dosage tutoring program to address COVID-interrupted learning among low-income students. She has also contributed articles to Refinery29 and the New Hampshire Union Leader, and has presented her research at various conferences and events.

Caroline’s favorite pastimes are running, reading, and watching terrible television with her little sisters. In the winter, she spends every moment she can shredding on the ski slopes.

Community-ownership business models designate various community stakeholders (producers, suppliers, employees, the environment) as shareholders. In theory, this model ensures that an enterprise’s missions will align with its stakeholders’ interests: cultural preservation; healthcare; livable wages; and environmental protection. However, practical applications of this model require investment in the business. Garnering the necessary buy-in is difficult, especially at large scales. Caroline’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining the factors that reinforce communities’ trust in businesses which claim to represent their interests. She believes that understanding the aspects of the community-ownership model that promotes trust could reveal crucial information about how it can generate social impact.

Lily Bello

Lily Bello is a recent graduate from CUNY’s Brooklyn College where she received a BA in anthropology with a minor in LGBT studies. Her studies focused on qualitative ethnographic research methodologies as well as on transgender cultures and human rights law. She has research experience – funded via internships, academic programs, and research awards – studying activist movements and community landownership. Besides her academic pursuits, Lily has both personal and professional experience in transgender rights activism, including by working with the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, a firm focused on human rights law as it applies to transgender communities. Following her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Lily will be pursuing PhD programs in anthropology to study the relationship between transgender human rights law and the decolonial conceptions of gender-variant identity.

Lily’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the emerging relationship between contemporary personal law and traditional modes of communal housing among hijra and other gender-variant communities. This ethnographic study is taking place in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru in order to account for local cultural differences in the housing practices of these communities. The research is addressing the relationship between legal structures and the social organization of gender-variant communities, and thus contributing to a broader discourse on the application of human rights law to such communities within their local cultural contexts.