Ahmedabad University Archives

Nancy Neiman

Prof. Nancy Neiman has been a Professor of Politics at Scripps College since 1994. She has won numerous teach, scholarship and community service awards. She has taught a wide range of political economy courses including, Markets and Politics in Latin America, the Power Elite: Surveying the Influence of Business over Public Policy, and Infrastructures of Justice. Prof. Neiman teaches a Political Economy of Food course through which she has organized a number of community engagement projects that bridge theory and practice among which are a social enterprise organized with women who were formerly incarcerated, a program called Plant Justice with students at an alternative high school, and a Meatless Monday program that brings students and women who were formerly incarcerated together to share prepare and share meals and food justice programming. She also teaches Napier intergenerational learning courses and Inside-Out courses inside a local prison. Her most recent book, Markets, Community and Just infrastructures, includes a variety of case studies, including an interfaith coffee cooperative in Uganda, Cuban financial reform, globalization in Juárez Mexico, and the US meatpacking industry, to provide a framework for understanding the conditions under which markets promote or undermine social justice.

Focusing on pastoralist women in Gujarat India, the Fulbright-Nehru project of Prof. Neiman intends to track several key coping strategies and practices during Covid-19 among Gujarati pastoralist communities during the pandemic: the struggle over access to grazing lands and the ability to maintain traditional livelihoods, access to healthcare, navigating women’s traditional roles and their role as leaders, and promoting agrarian citizenship. Using qualitative data analysis gathered from interviews and quantitative ARCGIS survey data tracking pastoralist migratory patterns and community welfare, this project hypothesizes that pastoralist identities in Gujarat support, and are supported by, a broader transformational food sovereignty movement.

Christopher LaMountain

Mr. Christopher LaMountain is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he pursued a double major in Religious Studies and Music Performance Studies. After being awarded an Undergraduate Research Grant from Northwestern in 2018, Mr. LaMountain completed a multi-media research project comparing gynecological texts of Mediterranean Antiquity with Marian narratives of the New Testament Apocrypha. In the latter portion of his collegiate career, Mr. LaMountain conducted research on devotional music at seven of the eight continental Baha’i Houses of Worship as the 2019 Northwestern Circumnavigator grantee. Having sung in choirs and as a classically trained tenor soloist, Mr. LaMountain also sung with the musicians of Baha’i Temples around the world and subsequently produced his honors undergraduate thesis comparing the musical styles and presentation forms of devotional music at the different Baha’i Temples. With the help of his colleagues from the Bienen School of Music, Mr. LaMountain has also presented two concert lectures on his comparative Baha’i musicological studies, which featured musical excepts from his worldwide research trip. Interested in inter-religious musicology and cross-cultural studies, Mr. LaMountain has achieved proficiency in French, Italian, and Hindi, passed upper-level courses on various traditions of the major world religions, and studied musical traditions, such as Negro Spiritual, Western Classical, Hindustani, Ugandan traditional, and Nueva Cancion Chilena musical styles. Mr. LaMountain aspires to pursue a graduate degree in sacred music studies, become a religious studies and musicology professor, and continue singing in choirs over the course of his life.

With his Fulbright-Nehru project, Mr. LaMountain is both observing and participating in the process of devotional music making at the prayer services of the Asian Baha’i House of Worship, called the Lotus Temple. In comparing both these observed musical styles and presentational forms of the Lotus Temple with other faith spaces in Delhi, for example Akshardham and ISKCON Temples, Gurudwara Bangla Sahib, Myanmar Buddha Temple, and Moti Masjid, Mr. LaMountain is determining the manner in which local worship music from religious traditions outside of the Baha’i Faith influences intonation of the Lotus Temple.

Christian James

Mr. Christian James is a PhD Candidate in Indiana University’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. His dissertation examines the role of musical performance in internationally funded human development initiatives operating within the Kangra District of Himachal Pradesh.

For over a decade, Mr. James has studied cultures and languages of North India with a special interest in folksongs of western Himachal Pradesh and Greater Punjab. He is proficient in four South Asian languages: Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and the Kangri dialect of Western Pahari. He has received multiple awards and fellowships for language and area studies, including two Critical Language Scholarships. With support from the U.S. Department of Education and Indiana University’s Center for the Study of Global Change, Mr. James spent the 2021-2022 academic year enrolled as the sole student in the first ever Kangri language course offered through the American Institute of Indian Studies.

Alongside his dissertation topic, Mr. James’ research interests include language ideology, public folklore, and Indic musicology. In 2021, the Midwestern Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology awarded him the JaFran Jones prize in recognition of his paper, “Nādānusandhān: Sound Studies and its Lexical Genealogy in Hindi-language Music Scholarship.” Mr. James has worked as an Articles Editor for Folklore Forum, the open-access journal of Folklore and Ethnomusicology Publications (also known as Trickster Press). In 2020, he served Traditional Arts Indiana as a contributor and editor for Memory, Art, & Aging, a public-facing resource guide encouraging older adults and elder care workers to engage with folk and traditional arts.

Mr. James has maintained an abiding passion for music throughout his life. In 2014, he completed a Bachelor’s of Music degree in composition from Oberlin Conservatory. His compositions have featured in several international venues, including the Charlotte New Music Festival in North Carolina (2013), Dharamshala International Film Festival in Himachal Pradesh (2014), and the Syndicate for the New Arts in Ohio (2017). He has worked as a choral singer, music educator, and church music director in Ohio and Indiana as well as his home state of Michigan.

Mr. James’ Fulbright-Nehru project investigates the role of participatory song in the feminist social development work of Jagori Rural Charitable Trust, a non-governmental organization operating in the Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh. Through a combination of participant observation, recorded interview, and audiovisual documentation, Mr. James assesses the effects of collective singing on the delivery of the organization’s objectives concerning the social, economic, and political empowerment of women and girls. The final report documents and analyzes the organization’s total song repertoire, the effects of specific songs, and participants’ experiences of those effects through performance.

Nancy Neiman

Aparna Kapadia

Dr. Aparna Kapadia is associate professor of history at Williams College. She is a social historian of early modern and modern South Asia. Her research particularly focuses on western Indian regional cultures, identities, and power structures as well as the subcontinent’s links with the Indian Ocean networks. Dr. Kapadia studied at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, from where she received her PhD in 2013. From 2009 until 2011, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford.

Dr. Kapadia is the author of In Praise of Kings: Rajputs, Sultans and Poets in Fifteenth-Century Gujarat (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and co-editor of The Idea of Gujarat: History, Ethnography and Text (Orient Blackswan, 2010). Her articles have appeared in several peer-reviewed academic journals like The Mediaeval History Journal and The Journal of Asian Studies. From 2021 to 2024, she served as associate editor at the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Dr. Kapadia also enjoys writing for popular asudiences. Since 2019, she has been publishing a column on a variety of topics in South Asian history called “Off Centre” in Scroll.in, one of India’s leading independent English-language digital publications.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Kapadia is conducting research for her upcoming book, Walking with the Mahatma: Kasturba Gandhi’s Political Life. This will be the first historically grounded and archivally researched biography of Kasturba (1869–1944), Mahatma Gandhi’s wife, which seeks to illuminate her pivotal but overlooked role as a political activist during India’s anti-colonial movement.

Lynna Dhanani

Dr. Lynna Dhanani obtained her doctorate from Yale University and joined the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis, in 2020 as an assistant professor of religious studies. She is currently working on her first major monograph, tentatively titled “Authority and Wonder: The Devotional Worlds of Hemacandra and Other Medieval Gujarati Hymn-makers”. Her research explores the confluence of interreligious polemics, philosophical debates, devotional themes, and poetics in the Sanskrit hymns of the celebrated 12th-century Svetambara Jain, Hemacandra, a court pandit to two Hindu kings of medieval Gujarat. Having dedicated herself to the study of multiple Indian religions for more than two decades, Dr. Dhanani has a wide range of interests, including Jainism, Sanskrit and Prakrit languages and literature, Indian philosophy and aesthetics, yoga, tantra, and especially South Asian religious art.

In 2023, she co-curated an exhibition at the UCLA Fowler Museum called “Visualizing Devotion: Jain Embroidered Shrine Hangings”, and is currently a co-author for the exhibition book. As a recipient of the Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellowship (2022–23) and as part of the “Entanglements of Indian Pasts” project, she has shared her work on the great 20th-century Jain scholar Muni Jambuvijaya and his manuscript preservation projects. In 2022, she was the main organizer of the field-defining conference “Beyond Boundaries: In Honor of John E. Cort”, which brought together numerous scholars in honor of Dr. Cort, a prolific scholar in the fields of Jain and South Asian studies.

Dr. Dhanani’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the diversity of Jain hymns produced in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Apabhramsha languages in 11th–13th century Gujarat by the polymath Hemacandra and his contemporaries; the objective is to understand better their perceptions of the broader religious and intellectual worlds in which they flourished and their relationship with religious centers and the royal courts. In this context, she is exploring several libraries across north-west India and engaging local scholars, Jain communities, and Indian institutions in order to collect and analyze these hymns. This work will inform her first book manuscript as well as other publications.