University of Chicago Archives

Rutwij Nakhwa

Mr. Rutwij Nakhwa is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. His dissertation is on Hegel’s political philosophy. His research interests lie in Marx, psychoanalysis, film and literary theory, and B. R. Ambedkar. Since 2018, he has taught and guest-lectured at the Mass Media Department of St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. For years, Rutwij covered India’s film festivals as a journalist and in various other capacities. He has written on cinema for The Hindu. He holds a post-graduate diploma in critical theory, aesthetics, and practice from Jnanapravaha Mumbai (2018) and a bachelor’s degree in Mass Media (Journalism) from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai (2017).

In 2024, Rutwij’s paper, ‘An Absolute Hegelianism for Postmodern Times: Hegel with Lacan after Bataille and Derrida’, was published in the Filozofija i društvo/Philosophy and Society journal. He has presented his work on Hegel at several conferences including those organised by Hegelian and philosophical societies, and on Ambedkar at the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Hyderabad.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Rutwij’s interdisciplinary work will interface Hegel’s philosophy with poetic and literary work, primarily that of Samuel Beckett. His research aims at a philosophical-literary examination of (conceptual and figural) endings and beginnings in relation to our time of repetitive crises, a time in which even the imagination of alternatives seems impossible. In response, this project’s wager is to think of a different repetition, which will pinpoint the peculiar conditions of possibility for imagination and creation of alternatives, allowing for a transformative reactualization of Hegel’s philosophy, for our present.

Divya Swaminathan

Ms. Divya Swaminathan is a Ph.D. scholar at the Infant – Toddler Language Development and Intervention Lab, Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology, National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru. Before joining NIMHANS for her Ph.D., Ms. Swaminathan worked at the St. John’s National Academy of Health Sciences, Bengaluru, where she worked on developing an early screening tool for identifying increased likelihood for autism (HL-ASD) in infants between 9-18 months. She is a passionate clinician – researcher with expertise in detection of and intervention for autism.

Ms. Swaminathan’s current area of research focuses on early caregiver speech (CGS) and its impact on the development of communication and language skills in infants at HL-ASD. She is using automatic speech recognition (ASR) models to evaluate early CGS.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ms. Swaminathan has joined Dr. Marisa Casillas’s lab. Ms. Swaminathan is working on improving existing ASR models that are sensitive to a multilingual setup. More accurate ASR models will help automatize amount of CGS that otherwise require laborious hand annotation

Aditya Vijaykumar

Mr. Aditya Vijaykumar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Astrophysical Relativity group at ICTS-TIFR in Bengaluru, working on various aspects of physics, astrophysics, cosmology with gravitational waves. Before joining ICTS-TIFR, he was an undergraduate student at BITS-Pilani, where he received a dual degree in Physics and Mechanical Engineering in 2018.

As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, Vijaykumar plans to work on understanding gravitational-wave observations from the perspective of cosmological large-scale structure. The advantage of this approach is two-fold: one can confirm existing cosmological inferences from other probes, and independently understand formation environments and mechanisms of the detected gravitational-wave events.

Mr. Vijaykumar is also active in the Bengaluru theatre circuit, as a part of the theatre company StageCraft. Most recently, he was the co-producer of ZOOMED IN!, an online theatre production featuring actors situated across two time zones. He also is an ardent lover of films and runs a film-analysis podcast called Cut to Scene! with a friend.