Central University of Himachal Pradesh Archives

Lara Lashus

Lara Lashus graduated from Trinity University with a BA in sociology and international studies (global health), and a concentration in gender and sexuality studies. Her interdisciplinary work focused on identity construction and relationships between gender, health, illness, and postcolonial development. In her senior year, she won the C. Wright Mills Award for outstanding achievement in sociology. She also earned departmental honors for her published thesis, “Hijra Subjectivity, Gender Aﬃrmative Care, and the Will to Verify: A Case Study in Confirmation Desire”. The thesis, using a post-structuralist lens, investigates how colonial and state capture of the hijra identity produced arenas of suspicion and verification, thereby shaping questions of safety, authority, and authenticity for the hijra amidst new medical and socio-legal developments. This work was based on the qualitative research she conducted while studying abroad in India during her junior year. Additionally, she has studied in Paraguay, where she worked to uplift the political and environmental rights of the indigenous Guaraní. She has also researched family planning access in the rural parts of eastern Uganda through a Yale fellowship program, and is a co-author of its findings published in Health & Place.

Lara is passionate about fighting for the dignified and equitable treatment of all. She has worked closely with local organizers to collaborate with student activists, leading coalitions for reproductive justice, and as a harm reduction intern serving the impoverished and unhoused communities of San Antonio. She won grants such as the John Donahue Award for Social Justice to complete this work. For the past four years, she has been working as a research assistant to sociology professors Dr. Amanda Hernandez and Dr. Amy Stone on various projects, primarily analyzing LGBTQ youth experiences.

With her Fulbright-Nehru award, Lara is studying cultural and climatic shifts related to the business, harvest, and use of native plants for medicinal purposes in the rural Himalayan regions. Her research is also seeking answers to how diﬀerent practitioners perceive and navigate cultural barriers to care in these regions, given the shifting structural and environmental constraints. Further, she is studying the role of herbal medicine in the lives of local women and the growing market for medicinal agriculture within the international economy.

Joshua Shelton

Joshua Shelton is a doctoral candidate in the Religious Studies Department at Northwestern University where he specializes in Buddhist and critical masculinities studies. His research focuses on the phenomenological textures of religious manhood in Tibetan tantra, seeking to illuminate the inflection points between masculinity as an abstract concept and manliness as an embodied enactment. His dissertation pursues these questions by attending to the life and writings of the nineteenth-century tantric virtuoso Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé, the gun-wielding, deer-hunting, beer-drinking tantric master descended from a line of “bloodthirsty bandits” in eastern Tibet.

Joshua earned his bachelor’s in religious studies and English literature at Georgetown University where his thesis on demon possession was awarded the Theta Alpha Kappa Award for excellence in undergraduate research. After college, Joshua spent two years at the Georgetown University Law Center working on his JD degree before deciding his passion for education and social service would be better served by a career in academia and activism. Joshua continued his graduate training in Buddhist studies at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder where he received the Moore Fellowship to conduct historiographic research on tantric masculinity for his master’s in Buddhist studies. At CU, he also served as the editor-in-chief for the university’s NEXT journal. He currently serves as the coordinator for the Khyentse Foundation Buddhist Studies Lecture Series at Northwestern University.

Joshua’s Fulbright-Nehru research is attending to the life, writings, and historical context of Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé. His project emphasizes the structural roles masculinity plays as both abstract ideology and embodied practice in Tibetan religious history. Ultimately, Joshua’s thesis seeks to de-essentialize masculinity by situating it within history and alongside politics, economics, and sociology. It also emphasizes the role of non-secular Indigenous cosmology in the felt textures of religious manhood.

Briana Brightly

Briana Brightly is a PhD candidate in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research centers on the intersection of religion, art, and science in South Asia. Briana’s dissertation, “The Buddhist Craftsman: Making Images during the Golden Age of Tibetan Medicine, 1600–1800”, investigates how physicians and artists used the tools and techniques of Buddhist image-making to advance medical knowledge in early-modern Tibet. In probing the production of images, rather than their consumption, Briana hopes to open up new possibilities for how scholars imagine the “sacred” in relation to the “scientific” within the context of visual culture.

Briana’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the creation of anatomical illustrations in 17th-century Tibet. In order to visualize the human body, Tibetan artists not only observed dissected corpses but also followed a highly codified system of measurement which formed the basis of religious paintings during this period. How did they reconcile these two points of view? And what can their creative process tell us about the relationship between religion, art, and medicine in early-modern Tibet? These are some of the questions that Briana is addressing at the Men-Tsee-Khang Tibetan Medical & Astrological Institute in Dharamshala, her primary site of research.