Host Institution India: University of Texas at Austin

Bikram Pain

Mr. Bikram Pain is an Integrated PhD student at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), Bengaluru, where he works on the dynamics of many-body quantum systems. His PhD research is motivated by a fundamental question in modern quantum physics: how is information transported, scrambled, and encoded across space and time in isolated quantum systems? By studying hidden statistical structures, his work aims to connect diverse signatures of quantum information spreading within a common microscopic framework.

Bikram completed his bachelor’s degree at Midnapore College before joining ICTS for doctoral studies. In March 2024, he visited Nordita: The Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stockholm, Sweden, as a Visiting PhD Student, where he worked on Anderson localisation in long-range correlated systems.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellow, Bikram is working at the University of Texas at Austin on questions related to information scrambling and correlations in quantum systems using statistical approaches. His work aims to contribute to a finer understanding of how information is stored and shared in interacting quantum systems. Outside academia, Bikram enjoys cooking, running, and reading.

Anjana Manoj Nair

Ms. Anjana Manoj Nair is a PhD candidate in the Department of History, School of Social Sciences, at the University of Hyderabad. She completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from the University of Delhi. Anjana’s current research focuses on transgressions and deviance, examining their codification within normative Sanskrit theological discourses and parallel contestations within narrative literary traditions across a historical continuum.

Anjana has been an ICSSR grantee under the International Collaboration Data-Collection Scheme in 2025, and a Getty grantee in 2024 for attending the 36th Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art held in Lyon. Alongside presenting her research at international academic forums such as the 28th European Conference on South Asia Studies in Heidelberg, and the 13th International Convention of Asia Scholars in Surabaya, she has also published in multiple reputed journals.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellow, Anjana is conducting her research in the Department of Asian Studies, College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Her project employs an innovative methodological framework that integrates quantitative techniques for terminological frequency analysis of spatial categories with qualitative archival research, supported by digital humanities tools and a database of rare manuscript variants housed in U.S. repositories. Moving beyond prevailing notions of ‘status’, ‘dignity’, and ‘reputation’ as analytical parameters, Anjana examines social hierarchies and spatial marginalization through the conceptual lenses of ‘deviant spaces’ and ‘spatial outliers.’ In her spare time, Anjana enjoys birdwatching, wildlife safaris, trekking in the Western Ghats, and underwater diving.

Shaifali Arora

Dr. Shaifali Arora is a scholar of colonial and postcolonial South Asian history, with a particular interest in the cultural and linguistic history of the 1947 Partition of India. Her research examines how histories of displacement are remembered, reworked, and transmitted through everyday practices, with a particular focus on Punjab.

Dr. Arora received her PhD in English from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology Indore. She holds an MA and MPhil in English and a BA (Hons) in English from Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi. She has also qualified the UGC-NTA NET in English. She received the Alliance of Digital Humanities Bursary Award to visit McGill University, Canada, in 2017 and the ASEM-DUO Fellowship to visit Lancaster University, UK, in 2020.

Dr. Arora’s research papers have been published in international journals such as South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (Taylor & Francis) and Contemporary South Asia (Taylor & Francis).

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr. Arora will document and analyze the culinary practices of refugees from regions such as Bahawalpur and Multan, focusing on how food functions as a living archive of displacement, resilience, and gendered memory. Her project is significant as South Asian Studies programs in the US are increasingly foregrounding micro-histories, gendered narratives, and diasporic memory in understanding Partition. This project will illustrate how domestic culinary practices serve as cultural repositories, particularly among women whose roles as preservers and transmitters of subregional identities through food remain critically underexplored.

Shantanu Kumar

Dr. Shantanu Kumar is a Junior Resource Person at the Linguistic Data Consortium for Indian Languages, Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore. He is primarily a linguist with a passion for leveraging technology, pedagogy, and data-driven research to advance language technologies, particularly for Indian languages. He holds a PhD and an MA in Linguistics from the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, and Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, respectively. He contributed to developing Maithili Anulekhika, a pioneering speech recognition tool that marks the first instance of speech technology support for Maithili, a low-resource language.

As a multilingual team leader, Dr. Kumar is dedicated to bridging traditional linguistic knowledge with technological innovation and rigorous academic standards. He has been instrumental in creating numerous datasets crucial to language technology development. He has coordinated numerous workshops and conferences related to computational linguistics, data collection, and language documentation. He has co-authored multiple peer-reviewed publications and book chapters on topics related to corpus and computational linguistics. He is passionate about language documentation, digital humanities, and inclusive language technologies, with a long-term vision to integrate linguistic heritage with cutting-edge AI applications.

As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Dr. Kumar is teaching Hindi at the Department of Asian Studies, University of Texas at Austin. He is actively engaged in exploring American cultural diversity and promoting India’s social and linguistic heritage. His future aspirations include establishing inter-university collaborations through the adoption of trans-disciplinary approaches in language learning and teaching.

Kanchan K. Malik

Dr. Kanchan K. Malik is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Hyderabad, India, where she also served as Head from 2017-20. She has been a Faculty Fellow with UNESCO Chair on Community Media since 2011 and Editor of the e-newsletter, CR News. With a dual Master’s in Economics and Mass Communication, Dr. Malik worked as a journalist with The Economic Times, New Delhi, before kindling her career in academics. Dr. Malik’s teaching and research are in the areas of community media, women in community communications, journalism studies, and media ethics. She has worked with national and international research projects and published papers on media interventions by non-governmental organizations for empowerment at the grassroots level.

Dr. Malik co-authored with Prof. Vinod Pavarala the much-cited book ‘Other Voices: The Struggle for Community Radio in India’ (Sage: 2007). Her co-edited book is ‘Community Radio in South Asia: Reclaiming the Airwaves’ (Routledge: 2020). She recently worked on the manual ‘Strengthening Gender Sensitive Practices and Programming in Community Radio’ (UNESCO, 2021).

Dr. Malik’s Fulbright-Nehru teaching component will comprise thematic seminars focusing on how community media in South Asia have enabled women to create gender spaces, challenge women’s marginalization in access to media and help mainstream gender in social change discourses. Her research project will seek to develop a framework for interpreting the empowerment question through the culturally rooted lived realities of women engaged in community communication and untangling how women negotiate with and navigate the deep-rooted issues affecting gender equality.

Manvi Tandon

Manvi Tandon is a PhD candidate at the Department of English, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. She completed her master’s in English literature from Banaras Hindu University in 2022, following which she taught English at North-Eastern Hill University, Tura, Meghalaya for a semester as a guest lecturer. For her doctoral research, Manvi is studying narratives of relational childhood trauma. She is working in the area of childhood studies and is deeply interested in childhood ideology and child rights advocacy. Her academic interests include childhood narratives, translation, and popular culture.

Manvi studies Indian fiction for her doctoral thesis. She avidly participated in volunteering and social work during her undergraduate days through the National Service Scheme (NSS), and an internship at My Home India where she worked with ‘Children Under Need for Care and Protection.’

As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Manvi is assisting with teaching Hindi at the Department of Asian Studies, the University of Texas at Austin, TX. She hopes to contribute to the university’s language programs and foster cross-cultural understanding. This opportunity will also allow her to immerse herself in American culture and share her knowledge of Indian life, to fulfill her role as a cultural ambassador.

Miriam Chandy Menacherry

Miriam Chandy Menacherry, filmmaker and founder of Filament Pictures, is known for her documentary films which celebrate everyday heroes, such as Stuntmen of Bollywood (2005), Robot Jockey (2007), The Rat Race (2011), Lyari Notes (2015), The Leopard’s Tribe (2022) and From the Shadows (2022). She was a Global Media Makers fellow (instituted by Film Independent) and a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television) India fellow. She is also a masterclass panelist at IFFI on “Indian documentary on the World Stage”.

Miriam has completed her postgraduate degree from the AJK Mass Communication Research Center, New Delhi. Her social documentaries shed light on invisible narratives to construct a complex reality overlooked by mainstream media, and they have been selected at leading film festivals and broadcast worldwide. Her films have also been screened in educational institutes in India and abroad such as IIT Mumbai, Mount Carmel College, AJK Mass Communication Research Center, New York University, the University of Texas at Austin, Oxford University, and SOAS.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence (Research and Teaching) fellowship at the University of Texas, Austin, TX, Miriam is engaging with students of film to develop a dialogue about critically important yet invisible stories from India and expand the scope of her research supported by the India Foundation for the Arts to visibilise the contribution of women in cinema to include parallel developments in Hollywood.