Host Institution USA: Ashoka University

Avital Datskovsky

Avital Datskovsky is a PhD student in the Anthropology Department at Syracuse University. She holds a bachelor’s degree (2013) in South Asian languages and civilizations from the University of Chicago and a master’s degree (2018) in development studies with a focus on contemporary India from SOAS University of London.

Avital’s Fulbright-Nehru project is tracing human and animal inclusion and exclusion from the Ranthambore National Park (RNP), an Indian tiger reserve, established in the 1970s as part of India’s conservation program called Project Tiger. As the park has grown substantially in terms of its tiger population and as an ecotourist destination, communities reliant on the forest for their livelihoods have been excluded from the park. Avital’s ethnographic project is considering what different responses of humans and animals to the RNP as a protected area reveal about political, social, and economic formations in the area; it is also exploring what possibilities for conservation may emerge when the impacts of Project Tiger are studied in terms of human and animal relationality.

Carlin Romano

Prof. Carlin Romano teaches media theory and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of America the Philosophical (Alfred A. Knopf/Vintage), described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as “Massive, impressive and indispensable…perhaps the best history of American philosophy of the past half-century”, and by National Public Radio as “dauntingly brilliant”. He is also the editor and contributor to Philadelphia Noir, a collection of original short stories in the highly praised Akashic Noir series.

As a journalist, literary critic, and public intellectual, Prof. Romano has held many prominent positions, including being the president of the National Book Critics Circle, literary editor and literary critic for 25 years for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and critic-at-large for several reputed publications. His criticism has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Nation, the Wall Street Journal, the American Scholar, and the Village Voice. Prof. Romano has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Peking University’s Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, the First Foreign Philosophy Visiting Fellow at Fudan University, a Fulbright Scholar to Germany and Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Criticism, who was cited by the Pulitzer Board for “bringing new vitality to the classic essay across a formidable array of topics”.

As a philosopher, Prof. Romano has taught at prestigious institutions like Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and St. Petersburg State University. He is the author of the main article, “East Asian Philosophy of Religion”, in the International Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion and of an article on Umberto Eco in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics.

As a pragmatism scholar, Prof. Romano is writing a book entitled Over There: The Internationalization of American Philosophy. Through the Fulbright-Nehru project, the book is extending its territory to India. Prof. Romano is also studying how Bhimrao Ambedkar, John Dewey’s most influential Indian student, shaped Indian law and politics. Besides, he is probing and analyzing modern Indian philosophy, cinema, literature, TV, and journalism to identify pragmatist elements and resonances.

Arjendu Pattanayak

Prof. Pattanayak is a mathematical and computational physicist with over 30 peer-reviewed publications on problems in irreversibility and entropy in complex dynamics, with a focus on quantum systems (“quantum thermodynamics” or “quantum chaos”). He got his undergraduate degree from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, his master’s from Brown University, and his PhD from The University of Texas at Austin. After his postdoctoral training at the University of Toronto and a visiting position at Rice University, he has been with Carleton College since 2001 where students from his group have helped build the now-burgeoning quantum information industry. His recent research has shifted to also include biophysics, and explores applied and interdisciplinary complexity alongside challenging thermodynamics questions about the statistical mechanics of cell fates using innovative information theory approaches and tools.

Prof. Pattanayak has served as chair of his department and as an associate dean of the college. He has also co-organized conferences on liberal arts universities in India as well as led study abroad programs to India. He has held fellowships at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara twice. He has also been hosted for long-term research and teaching visits by the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, the National University of Singapore, the University of Insubria in Como, the University of Perugia, and the University of New Mexico.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Pattanayak is teaching a course at Ashoka University on contemporary topics in quantum physics by advancing beyond the typical undergraduate quantum course to introduce students to the rapidly growing frontiers of quantum information and quantum computing technology. This will build on his previous work at Carleton and involve Ashoka students in creating a strong course for future students at both institutions, as well as enable others to teach it in the long run by sharing elements of the final course with the broader community. Prof. Pattanayak also hopes to seed bilateral research and pedagogy exchanges and long-term connections between Ashoka and Carleton.