Host Institution India: University of Pennsylvania

Krupa Rajangam

Dr. Krupa Rajangam is a humanities-based heritage scholar and conservation practitioner. In her research, she draws on anthropology and social geography to interpret nature-culture conservation practices, particularly the construction of socio-cultural place identities, urban-rural geographies, and tourism imaginaries. Her work is community-engaged, with a focus on public dissemination of research.

Dr. Rajangam earned her bachelor’s in architecture in 1999 from the RV College of Engineering, Bengaluru and her master’s in conservation studies in 2005 from the Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies, University of York, UK. In 2020, she completed her doctorate in conservation studies at the National Institute of Advanced Studies and Manipal Academy of Higher Education.

Dr. Rajangam is the Founder-Director of a collective called “Saythu… Linking People and Heritage” and an editorial board member of the Taylor & Francis journal, Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites (CMAS). She runs an immersive field school that is driven by and teaches critical theory, experiential field-based education, and interdisciplinary methods of learning.

Through her Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Rajangam is working to contribute to global debates on archaeological and heritage place-making, social geography, and social violence as outcomes of UNESCO World Heritage inscription, boundary demarcation, and management. The need for such studies is pressing urban-centric development of historic landscapes, contrary to the intent of practice and policy, is deepening social marginalization.

Poulami Nandi

Dr. Poulami Nandi is a postdoctoral fellow at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gujarat since March 2022. She received her Ph.D. in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK) in April 2022. She earned her master’s in physics from IITK and joined the research group of Prof. Arjun Bagchi in 2017 to pursue her Ph.D. Her doctoral thesis “Carrollian Conformal Symmetry and Holography” focuses on Carrollian conformal and BMS field theories, and their relations with the holographic principle for asymptotically flat spacetimes.

During her Ph.D., Dr. Nandi was awarded two international fellowships: the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Fellowship 2019-2020 for nine months to visit the University of California, Davis and the Overseas Visiting Doctoral Fellowship 2018-2019 for 12 months by the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Government of India. She was also affiliated with the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Austria for six months from August 2019 before moving to California in 2020. She was awarded International Travel Support (ITS) by SERB in 2022 to present her work at the prestigious annual conference “Strings” in Vienna. She also received the INSPIRE scholarship from the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India during her undergraduate studies. She has co-authored several publications in international high-impact journals and presented her works through multiple seminars and posters in India and Europe.

The holographic principle is one of our best hopes to understand quantum gravity. One of its most prominent examples is the AdS/CFT correspondence, which is also deeply connected to diverse branches of physics, such as condensed matter, quantum information, and optics. During her Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellowship, Dr. Nandi is investigating the interface of quantum theory of gravity and theory of quantum computation. She is working to understand aspects of quantum information theory for non-Lorentzian field theories, in the context of flat-space holography, and also the dynamics of quantum systems.

Ahana Ghosh

Ms. Ahana Ghosh is a doctoral scholar and Teaching Assistant at the Archaeological Sciences Centre, Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gujarat. She is also a student ambassador from South Asia for the Society for Archaeological Sciences. She completed her master’s and M.Phil. in archaeology from the University of Kolkata, Kolkata, and Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute, Pune, Maharashtra respectively. Her research interest is grounded in the food archaeology of South Asia. Her work also elucidates the concept of “culinary landscape” and different aspects of “realities” and “representations” of food.

In the past, Ms. Ghosh held an Early Career Researcher position at the Rewriting World Archaeology program, Durham University, UK, and was Visiting Researcher at Stockholm University, Sweden as well as at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, US. She has published and co-authored papers and book chapters in many reputed international peer-reviewed journals like Holocene, Radio-Carbon, and Zenedo, and also presented her work at many international conferences. Moreover, she received “Student Research Support” from the Society for Archaeological Sciences for her doctoral project, and has shot a documentary film on the culinary journey of the communities living in the Dholavira village, Rann of Kutch, Gujarat.

Ms. Ghosh’s doctoral project explores the foodways of ancient Harappans from some of the selected settlements located in different geographical zones, like the Kutch region of Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Himachal Pradesh. Within foodways, she aims to explore their dietary and ritual practices by examining the biomolecular components lying in the organic residues within ceramics used by the inhabitants of these settlements. Dietary studies are still in the embryonic phase in South Asian archaeology. Thus, conventional ceramic studies must be reassessed and augmented with the latest scientific methodologies and different nuances of food anthropology and cultural ecology to develop a broader view of ancient foodways at the site-specific and panoptic regional level for the subcontinent’s first complex society. For the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Ms. Ghosh is working on the methodological and interpretational part of her doctoral project and is combining analytical outcomes with food anthropological theoretical abstractions.

P.K. Yasser Arafath

Dr. P.K. Yasser Arafath is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Delhi and a historian of medieval and early modern India. He was L.M. Singhi Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge in 2017.

Dr. Arafath received his Ph.D. from the University of Hyderabad, and his research primarily focuses on South India. He is interested in its intellectual traditions, transliterated literature, history of violence, communities in the Indian Ocean, and the cultural history of the body and hygiene in the region. He has co-edited Sultana’s Sisters: Genre, Gender, and Genealogy in South Asian Muslim Women’s Fiction (Routledge, 2021) and The Hijab: Islam, Women and the Politics of Clothing (Simon & Schuster, 2022). Dr. Arafath won the prestigious Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer Best Published Paper Award (2020–2021) for his research article that he published in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Arafath is examining how a section of South Asian Islamic scholars shaped the gender sensibilities of the Mappila-Muslims of Malabar by engaging with multiple discourses within the region and beyond in the 19th century. His project aims to do a systematic study of gender and sexuality in Arabi-Malayalam, a transliterated textual tradition in the Indian Ocean region that entails writing Malayalam —the native tongue of Kerala —in Arabic script. This study will add to the existing body of knowledge on gendered Islam in South Asia and gender discourses in South Asian Islamic cultures in the 19th century.

Divay Gupta

Mr. Divay Gupta is a leading Heritage Conservation and Management expert with more than twenty-five years of professional and academic experience. An Alumni of ICCROM, University of Birmingham, and School of Planning and Architecture, he has been part of several prestigious projects in UK, USA, India, Afghanistan, Nepal and Cambodia. He has led several heritage projects and initiatives at building and urban level at INTACH, New Delhi. His restoration projects in Ladakh have won the South Asian UNESCO awards of Merit and Excellence. He is a member of the UNESCO International Conservation Committee on Preah Vihear, Government of Cambodia and has served as an expert member on National Culture Fund and Advisory committee on World Heritage matters to ASI, Government of India. He was also a visiting faculty and a member on the board of studies of the Department of Architecture Conservation at SPA, New Delhi. He has several publications on conservation and has been invited to keynote lectures at various national and international conferences. Based on his diverse expertise, he provides thought leadership in using cultural lead value-based integrated approach in heritage conservation by developing sustainable models in tourism, urban development and economic regeneration to create cultural assets and vibrant historic cities.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Gupta is developing his argument of positioning historic cities as ‘smart cities’, looking beyond concepts of ICT, where reviving and harnessing the unique heritage assets of these cities helps in achieving the SDGs, making them vibrant ‘smarter cities’.

Lalitha Kamath

Prof Lalitha Kamath is Professor and Chairperson of the Centre for Urban Policy and Governance, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. She has a Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Policy Development from Rutgers University.

Prof Kamath’s research interests include urban governance, planning, infrastructure, urban informality, and critical pedagogies. She writes on dominant forms of urban transformations in the Global South – both the structural violence of spatial transformation and processes of slow violence to urban environments. Her writing also demonstrates the agency of marginalized groups in challenging dominant urbanisms through ethnography, film and multimedia formats (see https://www.inhabitedsea.org/the-sea-and-the-city and https://makebreak.tiss.edu/)

Based on her ongoing work on climate planning in Mumbai, in her Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Prof Kamath is doing two comparisons with estuarine cities in the U.S. and South Asia. First, to illuminate how expert-led planning interventions have marginalized littoral communities/environments and also how these communities demonstrate ‘ordinary’ expertise in climate changed cities. Second, to deepen cross-fertilization between Northern and Southern theoretical perspectives that challenge dominant planning expertise by building from the situated expertise of marginalized communities. This will help catalyze more just climate planning across both South and North