Host City USA: Sonipat

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.

Arjendu Pattanayak

Prof. Pattanayak is a mathematical and computational physicist with over 30 peer-reviewed publications on problems in irreversibility and entropy in complex dynamics, with a focus on quantum systems (“quantum thermodynamics” or “quantum chaos”). He got his undergraduate degree from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, his master’s from Brown University, and his PhD from The University of Texas at Austin. After his postdoctoral training at the University of Toronto and a visiting position at Rice University, he has been with Carleton College since 2001 where students from his group have helped build the now-burgeoning quantum information industry. His recent research has shifted to also include biophysics, and explores applied and interdisciplinary complexity alongside challenging thermodynamics questions about the statistical mechanics of cell fates using innovative information theory approaches and tools.

Prof. Pattanayak has served as chair of his department and as an associate dean of the college. He has also co-organized conferences on liberal arts universities in India as well as led study abroad programs to India. He has held fellowships at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara twice. He has also been hosted for long-term research and teaching visits by the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, the National University of Singapore, the University of Insubria in Como, the University of Perugia, and the University of New Mexico.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Pattanayak is teaching a course at Ashoka University on contemporary topics in quantum physics by advancing beyond the typical undergraduate quantum course to introduce students to the rapidly growing frontiers of quantum information and quantum computing technology. This will build on his previous work at Carleton and involve Ashoka students in creating a strong course for future students at both institutions, as well as enable others to teach it in the long run by sharing elements of the final course with the broader community. Prof. Pattanayak also hopes to seed bilateral research and pedagogy exchanges and long-term connections between Ashoka and Carleton.