Host Institution India: Emory University

Sumit Baudh

Dr. Sumit Baudh (they/them or he/him) is a Professor of Law at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana. Dr. Baudh received their Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) from the University of California, Los Angeles, CA (UCLA) School of Law, Master of Laws (LL.M.) from the London School of Economics, London, UK, and a Bachelor of Arts and Laws with Honors (B.A. LL.B. Hons.) from National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, Karnataka.

As a former British Chevening scholar, Dr. Baudh has held prestigious Fellowships including the University of California Human Rights Fellow, Berkeley, Michael D. Palm Fellow of the Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, Fellow of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, Columbia Law School, and the Transnational Law Institute Fellow, King’s College London. Dr. Baudh is qualified to practice law as an Advocate in India and enrolled as a Solicitor with The Law Society, England and Wales. As an independent consultant, Dr. Baudh has advised national and international organizations including the US based Arcus Foundation, the United Nations Development Program, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, and the Norway-based LLH.

As the first Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Chair at Emory University, Dr. Baudh’s research is titled ‘A Comparative Review of Civil and Human Rights in India and the United States of America. —from a Critical Race and Dalit perspective’; amidst other sources, the research is informed by classroom instructions of a taught course on Critical Race Theory and Caste.

Sarbeswar Sahoo

Dr. Sarbeswar Sahoo is working as an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. He was Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Erfurt (Germany) and Charles Wallace Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast (UK). He received his Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore and has held Visiting Fellowships at University of Groningen (Netherlands), University of Cardiff (UK), University of Muenster (Germany), University of Erfurt (Germany), Roskilde University (Denmark), Queen’s University Belfast (UK), and NUS (Singapore). His research interests include Neoliberalism, Sociology of Development, and Sociology of Religion. He is the author of Civil Society and Democratization in India (Routledge, 2013) and Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

During his Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellowship, Dr. Sahoo aims to compare the experiences of Bhil Pentecostals in India and Black Pentecostals in the US and discuss how different cultural contexts influence peoples’ lived religious experiences and how Pentecostalism is transforming the everyday socio-political lifeworld of people at the margins. A comparison of the Bhils with the experiences of Black Pentecostals in the US will help us understand not just the “contextual” nature of religious experiences and activities, but also the relationships between religion, state and secularism.

Melari Shisha Nongrum

Dr. Melari Shisha Nongrum is Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Public Health, Shillong, Meghalaya. She is an indigenous woman from the Khasi indigenous community of Meghalaya, located in the northeastern region of India. Dr. Nongrum has a master’s in social work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She conducted her research on sociocultural factors of vitamin A deficiency among children in Meghalaya, which was part of her doctoral thesis at Martin Luther Christian University, Shillong. Since her Ph.D., Dr. Nongrum has worked in the field of public health, especially in traditional knowledge systems of food and healing of the indigenous communities in her region. She acquired expertise on this subject through research and community projects, grounded in active community engagement. She co-authored the chapter “Treasures from shifting cultivation in the Himalayan’s evergreen forest” in a publication led by Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, Indigenous Peoples’ Food Systems: Insights on sustainability and resilience from the front line of climate change. This publication was awarded the 2021 Best in the World Sustainability Report Award by the Hallbars Sustainability Research Organization.

As Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Chair at Emory University, Dr. Nongrum’s is working on “The Multifactorial Facets of Tribal Health: Development of a Training Module on Tribal Health for Public Health and Allied Health Professionals”. She is also teaching a course titled “Multifaceted Nature of Tribes in India and the Traditional knowledge Systems of Food and Healing: Experiences from Tribal Communities in Northeastern India”.