Host City USA: Sonipat

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.

Devan Barker

Dr. Devan Barker is currently a professor of history at Brigham Young University (BYU)-Idaho where he teaches courses in world history and philosophy. Dr. Barker received a bachelor’s in Italian and a master’s in organizational behavior from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. His PhD was from the University of Wuerzburg in Germany where he studied intellectual history with an emphasis on the history of educational philosophy. Before pursuing his doctoral work, Dr. Barker was involved in starting and administering several private and charter schools, including a high school completion program in Mexico, a performing and fine arts school in Utah, Utah’s first charter school placed in a multimillion-dollar performing arts facility, and the national flagship school in the United States for Montessori education at the adolescent level. He has also worked in the corporate world for companies like Novell and PepsiCo.

Dr. Barker is a founding director of the Office of Instructional Development at BYU-Idaho where he oversaw faculty development and training programs for a decade while the school transitioned from a two-year college to a four-year university and tripled in size, adding over 700 new faculty. He continues his involvement in university pedagogy as a faculty fellow for the development office.

Over the course of his career, Dr. Barker has taught middle school, high school, undergraduate, and master’s students, has mentored several doctoral candidates, and has consulted with numerous other universities. He has presented workshops on a wide array of topics relevant to faculty development and has published articles and chapters on intellectual history as well as on university pedagogy.

The Fulbright-Nehru project involves partnering with an expert in the literature around university pedagogy and organizational change with a leading Indian university promoting educational reform. The goal is to support a university-wide culture shift from education-for-certification to knowledge production pursued as an end in the tradition of liberal arts institutions.

Shalini Puri

Prof. Shalini Puri has a PhD from Cornell University and is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests span postcolonial, Caribbean, gender, and memory studies; indentureship, slavery, and incarceration; environmental humanities; and social movements. She is especially interested in interdisciplinary and fieldwork-based humanities methods that explore the intersection of the arts, everyday life, and social justice.

Prof. Puri co-founded the Pitt Prison Education Project. She is the author of The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory and the award-winning The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity. She has co-edited Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities: Methods, Reflections, and Approaches to the Global South and several other books. She also edits Palgrave Macmillan’s New Caribbean Studies series. Currently, she is working on a book titled “Poetics for Freshwater Justice”.

As part of her Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Puri is collaborating with scholars at Ashoka University to explore how a comparative study of the Caribbean and India can reframe postcolonial studies and build enduring mechanisms for south–south exchange. The specific foci of the collaboration is research, teaching, advising, and capacity building to facilitate a cross-regional study of migration, environmentalisms, and water justice using the lens of literature and interdisciplinary humanities.

Alexander Williams

Alexander Williams is a joint JD–PhD student in history and law at Yale University. His research focuses on the history of corporate governance, capital markets, labor, and the legal profession in postcolonial India. He is broadly interested in global legal history, comparative private law, and the history and sociology of the legal profession. He has published in the Asian Journal of Comparative Law and the JUS GENTIUM Journal of International Legal History. He holds a BA in history and South Asian studies from Yale College.

Alexander’s Fulbright-Nehru project, “The Business of Law: Lawyers and the Economy in Modern India”, is studying the intertwined history of law, lawyers, and economic development in postcolonial India. The project is tracing how legal professionals and other actors in both the government and the private sector viewed law as a tool which could be harnessed for economic growth, the distribution of resources, and the pursuit of private ends.

Saideepika Rayala

Saideepika Rayala is a recent graduate of Yale University from where she received a BA in history and was part of Yale Law School’s academic program in human rights. Her studies focused on South Asian environmental history, forced migration, and international human rights law. Saideepika wrote her undergraduate history thesis on the relationship between Indian industrialization and nationalism during the 1920s Mulshi anti-dam movement.

At Yale, she served as the project leader for the Lowenstein Human Rights Project’s Crimes Against Humanity mission and advocated for a Crimes Against Humanity Treaty at the United Nations Sixth Committee. She also served as city editor of the Yale Daily News and online managing editor of The Yale Review of International Studies. Saideepika has worked for Yale Law School’s Schell Center for International Human Rights, the International Detention Coalition, and the Migrant Forum in Asia.

In her free time, Saideepika enjoys painting, boxing, listening to podcasts, and trying new foods.

Saideepika’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring how dams came to symbolize India’s trajectory toward freedom, modernity, and development in the post-independence period of the 1940s–1960s. She is conducting archival research and media analysis, primarily focusing on three major dams constructed during this period, to understand the debates surrounding these projects and how the country sought to balance economic development with ecological stability. She believes that studying this period can reveal how dams came to occupy a central role in Indian society and that past projects can inform modern-day dam-building efforts.

Aleksandr Kuzmenchuk

Alek Kuzmenchuk is a recent graduate of William & Mary, where he studied international relations and data science. He graduated summa cum laude and as a member of the oldest honor society in the United States, Phi Beta Kappa. His mother was born in Vadodara, India, and his father in Belarus. He is passionate about international affairs and public service and has completed internships at the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Global Research Institute, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and geoLab. He was also the editor-in-chief of William & Mary’s journal of international studies, The Monitor. As part of the Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship program, Alek spent the summer of 2023 studying Hindi in Jaipur. His research interests include Indian politics, Eastern European civic space, nuclear diplomacy, political behavior, and the role of ideology in international relations. In college, he was also a member and captain of the Division I gymnastics team. His recognitions include the NCAA Elite 90 Award, the Omicron Delta Kappa National Leader of the Year Award, the William & Mary Cypher Award, and the William & Mary Peel Hawthorne Award.

In his Fulbright-Nehru project, Alek is analyzing the records of India’s second president, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, to gain an understanding of India’s civilizational ethos through the lenses of political philosophy and religious ethics. Dr. Radhakrishnan’s body of work combines insights about the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism and its application to state building. Using that understanding, Alek, while working with researchers in the Department of International Relations at Ashoka University, is conducting conversational interviews with New Delhi residents and those from the surrounding area, as well as with those working in government, to understand how these insights are reflected in modern India.

Andrew Gordan

Andrew Gordan studies international relations with a focus on South Asia. He received an AB in government from Harvard University in 2024. In 2023, he received a Boren Scholarship to study Hindi and Urdu in Lucknow, India. As an undergraduate, Andrew worked across think tanks and research centers, including the Council on Foreign Relations, the Wilson Center, Harvard’s Negotiation Task Force, and Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

Andrew’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is exploring the role of elite attitudes and narratives in the making of Indian foreign policy, especially in relation to India’s rising power status. For this purpose, based in Delhi, he is conducting interviews, media analysis, and archival research.

Avital Datskovsky

Avital Datskovsky is a PhD student in the Anthropology Department at Syracuse University. She holds a bachelor’s degree (2013) in South Asian languages and civilizations from the University of Chicago and a master’s degree (2018) in development studies with a focus on contemporary India from SOAS University of London.

Avital’s Fulbright-Nehru project is tracing human and animal inclusion and exclusion from the Ranthambore National Park (RNP), an Indian tiger reserve, established in the 1970s as part of India’s conservation program called Project Tiger. As the park has grown substantially in terms of its tiger population and as an ecotourist destination, communities reliant on the forest for their livelihoods have been excluded from the park. Avital’s ethnographic project is considering what different responses of humans and animals to the RNP as a protected area reveal about political, social, and economic formations in the area; it is also exploring what possibilities for conservation may emerge when the impacts of Project Tiger are studied in terms of human and animal relationality.

Carlin Romano

Prof. Carlin Romano teaches media theory and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of America the Philosophical (Alfred A. Knopf/Vintage), described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as “Massive, impressive and indispensable…perhaps the best history of American philosophy of the past half-century”, and by National Public Radio as “dauntingly brilliant”. He is also the editor and contributor to Philadelphia Noir, a collection of original short stories in the highly praised Akashic Noir series.

As a journalist, literary critic, and public intellectual, Prof. Romano has held many prominent positions, including being the president of the National Book Critics Circle, literary editor and literary critic for 25 years for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and critic-at-large for several reputed publications. His criticism has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Nation, the Wall Street Journal, the American Scholar, and the Village Voice. Prof. Romano has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Peking University’s Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, the First Foreign Philosophy Visiting Fellow at Fudan University, a Fulbright Scholar to Germany and Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Criticism, who was cited by the Pulitzer Board for “bringing new vitality to the classic essay across a formidable array of topics”.

As a philosopher, Prof. Romano has taught at prestigious institutions like Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and St. Petersburg State University. He is the author of the main article, “East Asian Philosophy of Religion”, in the International Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion and of an article on Umberto Eco in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics.

As a pragmatism scholar, Prof. Romano is writing a book entitled Over There: The Internationalization of American Philosophy. Through the Fulbright-Nehru project, the book is extending its territory to India. Prof. Romano is also studying how Bhimrao Ambedkar, John Dewey’s most influential Indian student, shaped Indian law and politics. Besides, he is probing and analyzing modern Indian philosophy, cinema, literature, TV, and journalism to identify pragmatist elements and resonances.