Ambedkar University Archives

Rebecca Waxman

Ms. Rebecca Waxman is a PhD candidate at UCLA in the Department of History, specializing in South Asia and with a concentration in gender studies. Her work aims to study occurrences of sexual and gender-based violence that marked turning-point moments in colonial and postcolonial Indian social, political, and feminist histories. Ms. Waxman received her BA in history with a certificate in South Asian Studies from Wesleyan University in 2016, where she wrote her honors thesis historicizing the Delhi Gang Rape of 2012. Her work has been published in Women’s History Review and A Cultural Encyclopedia of Lost Cities and Civilizations (forthcoming).

Ms. Waxman’s dissertation project historicizes the relationship between the interpersonal, violent act of rape and the broader Indian society and politics, exploring how colonial categories and dynamics shaped understandings and legislation of female sexuality and of sexualized violence in British and independent India. It also studies the continuities and discontinuities between colonial and postcolonial India regarding rape. Ms. Waxman’s research endeavors to illuminate key nodes in the complex heterogeneous history of sexual violence in modern South Asia in order to recuperate the subjecthood of Indian women who enter the archive in moments of violation; it also aims to question the dominant knowledge structures informing the subjugation of women.

Andrew Kerr

Mr. Andrew Kerr is currently pursuing a PhD in Anthropology. His research world revolves around questions of poetry, semiotics, emotion, and sociality. Meanwhile, his commitments and passions are to always be engaged in collaborative work that centers human dignity. Mr. Kerr is a previous fellow with the American India Foundation and Urdu language resident director in Lucknow for the South Asia Flagship Language Initiative. He holds a BSc in Physics from Austin Peay State University, an MA in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago, and is always seeking to learn more.

Mr. Kerr’s Fulbright-Nehru project engages contemporary poetry in North India as not only literature or art, but also as a medium of popular expression that carries affective force in the public sphere. This study is taking place in Delhi, Lucknow, and Mumbai to explore questions about the public sphere, publics, affect, and imaginations of being Indian. The highlight on Urdu poetry, especially, will address the dearth of ethnographic analysis in Urdu studies, while also bringing an extended study of Urdu poetry in India into the growing body of literature in the anthropology of poetry.

Rhône Grajcar

Mr. Rhône Grajcar graduated from Whitman College in 2021 with a Bachelor of Arts in History and South Asian & Middle Eastern Studies. At Whitman he explored South Asian religions and US foreign policy, culminating in eight months spent in India on a David L. Boren Scholarship. He has followed his interests to internships at the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the South Asia Practice at the Albright Stonebridge Group. He is eager to deepen his understanding of South Asia religions and contribute to the study of shrines during his Fulbright-Nehru grant.

Mr. Grajcar’s Fulbright-Nehru project involves ethnographic field work at Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki Dargah in New Delhi and Dargah Yousoufain in Hyderabad, within the dargahs’ compounds. By engaging the dargah attendees in conversation, the project seeks to understand how COVID-19 and its impacts on daily life have affected the sense of community dargahs are renowned for. These shared spaces rely on crowded gatherings and communal food during langar to build their inclusive potentialities, which will present challenges in a post-COVID world. Situating the project in the understanding of dargahs as discursive, rather than fixed spaces, Mr. Grajcar hopes to help capture how these resilient institutions and their exploratory authority weather the disruptions of the pandemic.

Laila Durrani

Ms. Laila Noor Durrani is a recent graduate of Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts. She was born in New York City, and is of Indian origin. She holds a BA in Mathematics and Government, with a focus on global political systems. She has worked for a number of non-profit organizations in northern India, particularly those who work to address gaps in the country’s educational infrastructures, and to improve women’s access to education. Ms. Durrani is interested in the intersections between political conflict and gender disparities, and the ways that political violence often disproportionately infringe upon women’s freedoms and rights, in India, and globally. After her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Ms. Durrani hopes to attend graduate school for further her studies in Public Policy and Government, continuing to build upon her academic interests.

Through her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Ms. Durrani is investigating the effects of COVID-19 on India’s education systems, examining how the pandemic has exacerbated gender disparities in the realm of educational access, particularly within regions of India which have historically experienced political violence or instability. Ms. Durrani is working with the Observer Research Foundation as well as a number of education-focused non-profit organizations to write a series of proposals to inform future policy with regard to educational access.

Christopher Chacon

Mr. Christopher Leo Chacon is a sixth year History PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and works on early twentieth century Hindu political thought under his doctoral advisor, Dr. Vinayak Chaturvedi. Specifically, he is interested in how Hindu anticolonialism and intellectualism fostered innovative conceptions of history and social reform during the last decades of colonial India as well as for the global Indian community. He is a California State University Chancellor’s Doctoral Incentive Program scholar and has received numerous awards for writing and research. He was an AIIS Language fellow in 2018-2019 and studied Hindi in Jaipur, India. He was also the 2016 Southern California Regional Conference of Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society Best Graduate Paper Award recipient for their world history category.

Mr. Chacon enjoys facilitating discussions on history as a Teaching Assistant, a position he has held since 2017. While at UCI, he has guest lectured on topics ranging from ancient world history to Indian religions. A native of Orange County, he received his bachelor’s degree in Anthropology, History, and Religious Studies and his master’s degree in History from California State University, Fullerton in 2013 and 2016 respectively. While speaking on behalf of his graduating class in 2013, Mr. Chacon underscored his belief in a holistic approach to the humanities as well as dedicated himself to mentoring future young scholars as he began his graduate career. He has kept that promise by pursuing several certificate programs at his university centered on mentorship and currently leads a writing group for his department. Mr. Chacon will graduate in 2023 and, after completing his Mellon postdoctoral teaching appointment at UCI, pursue a career in either academics or the federal government. He will be the first in his family to receive a PhD. In his spare time, he enjoys watching films and bowling with family and friends.

Mr. Chacon’s Fulbright-Nehru project is an investigation into the transnational works of Lajpat Rai and Bhai Parmanand in order to reconstruct of one of the most consequential and influential sociopolitical movements of the 20th century—Hindu intellectualism. Through the lens of the relatively new and innovative field of global intellectual history, Mr. Chacon focuses on the writings of Parmanand and Rai so as to argue that their ideas were essential to the development of global Hindu intellectualism. Mr. Chacon has compiled evidence that strongly suggests their transnational experiences shaped Hindu intellectualism, which in turn contributed to worldbuilding before and after independence.

Aman Luthra

Dr. Aman Luthra is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the George Washington University in Washington, DC where he teaches courses in political ecology, development geography, and the geography of South Asia. Prior to this position, Dr. Luthra taught in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, MI. Dr. Luthra received his PhD from the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering at the John Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. His research primarily focuses on the changing landscape of labor and capital in the waste management sector in urban India, with a particular focus on informal workers in this industry. In addition to research on urban waste management, Dr. Luthra is also involved in an inter- and transdisciplinary collaborative project using citizen science to understand changing patterns of pollinator diversity and abundance in and around apple orchards in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Dr. Luthra has published articles in several leading journals in geography including Antipode, Geographical Review, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space and Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.

Dr. Luthra’s Fulbright-Nehru project proposes to examine the changing nature of work in the informal recycling economy in urban Indian using mixed methods including surveys and interviews with traditional kabariwalas (buyers of recyclable materials) and new firms that that use digital technologies to try and stake a claim in this market space. In addition to contributing to scholarship on the increasing ‘platformization’ of services, Fulbright’s support for this research will not only contribute to the development of evidence-based policy prescriptions in India, it will also allow the researcher to learn from, contribute to and build long- lasting relationships at Ambedkar University, Delhi.