Host Institution USA: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences

Meher Ali

Ms. Meher Ali is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University. At Princeton, she has been an organizer for the South Asia Graduate Workshop and the South Asia Digital Humanities Working Group, as well as a co-founder of the South Asia Translation Workshop. She was previously a Fulbright student researcher in Kolkata, India, and her work has also been supported by the AIIS language fellowship, the CLS program, and the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies. She received her MA from the University of Chicago and her BA in history with honors from Brown University.

Ms. Ali’s dissertation project traces the history of the public university and higher education in modern South Asia. By taking a capacious definition of the university — as, for example, a product of state policy, an icon of modernity, a material campus, and a site for politicization — her research engages multiple historiographical fields and methods including the history of global development, urban history, architectural history, oral and social history, and ethnographies of the state.

Evan Tims

Evan Tims is interested in the relationship between water, climate planning, and development in South Asia. Evan first traveled to Kolkata in 2018 as a Critical Language Scholar, and again in 2019 on the same grant, which were opportunities that allowed him to develop his skills in Bangla. In 2019, he graduated from Bard College with a joint major in written arts and human rights with a focus on anthropology. He then worked for the City Government of New York for almost two years before being named a Henry J. Luce Scholar. As a Luce Scholar, Evan studied in Nepal and researched water planning in the hydropower sector with Policy Entrepreneurs Inc., a Kathmandu-based NGO. He also studied and worked with a number of other organizations, including La.Lit magazine, where he conducted a creative writing workshop on climate change. This project led him to conduct more workshops and publish several works of climate storytelling from young writers in Nepal and Bangladesh. Currently, Evan works as a program associate with Activate, a U.S. nonprofit that funds scientists working on climate-related technologies.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Evan is conducting ethnographic research on the perceptions about Kolkata’s water future among distinct communities with connections to the Hooghly River. By balancing his work between groups of urban planners and those who have other relationships with the river, he is studying the differences between professionalized, scientific, and lived experiences of Kolkata’s water. Evan is also seeking to understand the complex, layered relationships between stakeholder communities as they seek to negotiate the future of water in a rapidly developing city.

Devin Creed

Devin Creed is a PhD candidate in South Asian history at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He has completed field exams in modern South Asian history, global British empire, food history, and science and empire. Devin’s dissertation examines the changes in the practices and ideologies of “giving for eating” in the context of famines in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asia. He works with sources in Bangla, Hindi, Urdu, and English. At Duke, Devin has been a Kenan Graduate Fellow, a Capper Fellow in intellectual history, and a fellow at the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge. He has made public presentations on: the erotica of the pickle in South Asian literature and history; traces of Portuguese cuisine in modern West Bengal; the political theory of B.R. Ambedkar; and the history of Catholic missions in Meghalaya. His research interests include metabolic and ecological histories, food and fermentation, and capitalism and imperialism.

He has previously received grants to conduct research in Philadelphia (on the Knights of Labor), London (on British famine policy), Northern Ireland (on martyrdom in the Irish Republican Army), and India (on famine relief). He received his MA in modern European history from Villanova University (Pennsylvania) and his BA in economics and English literature from Hillsdale College (Michigan).

Devin is an avid cook and food experimenter who spends a good deal of his time pickling, fermenting, baking, and cooking. He enjoys reading science fiction, watching films, backpacking, hiking, singing, and learning languages.

Devastating famines punctuated British colonial rule in India, a period that saw famines in Bengal in 1770 and 1943 which killed over 10 million people. Devin’s Fulbright-Nehru project is arguing that the Indian responses to states of endemic malnutrition and famine played a significant role in creating the postcolonial regimes of food charity – what he calls “giving for eating” – in India today. Devin’s research is being driven by the following question: how did inherited understandings and practices of gifting food change in the face of widespread famine, new ideas of Western humanitarianism, and the birth of modern nutrition science?

Sunanda Sanyal

Originally from India, Dr. Sunanda Sanyal is currently a professor of art history and critical studies at the College of Art & Design of Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has been teaching at this institution since 1999. He has a PhD in art history from Emory University (2000), an MFA in art history from Ohio University (1993), and an MFA in visual arts from the University of California, San Diego (1990).

Dr. Sanyal’s research interests include contemporary artists from former colonies in global discourses, and politics of representation and identity. He has chaired panels on contemporary artists of color at various conferences, including those of the College Art Association, the African Studies Association, the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, and the American Council of South and Southeast Asian Art. He has published articles and reviews of contemporary art in journals and contributed chapters to volumes of essays on art history and criticism. Some of his publications are: “Critiquing the Critique: El Anatsui and the Politics of Inclusion”, World Art (Routledge); “‘Being Modern’: Identity Debates and Makerere’s Art School in the 1960s”, A Companion to Modern African Art (Wiley-Blackwell); and “Teaching Art History at an Art School: Making Sense from the Margin”, Transforming Classroom Culture: Inclusive Pedagogical Approaches (Palgrave Macmillan). In 2009, Dr. Sanyal produced and directed a two-part documentary film, A Homecoming Spectacle, on the visual culture of Durga Pujo in Kolkata, focusing on the involvement of contemporary artists in the décor of the festival. Currently, he is also serving as a content fellow for SmartHistry.org; besides, he is working on a book project on a history of civic statuary in Kolkata, India.

Dr. Sanyal’s Fulbright-Nehru project is constructing a historical narrative across three phases of Kolkata’s civic statuary: the colonial commemoration of prominent men of the British Raj; the post-Independence celebration of the leaders of Indian freedom struggle; and the current populist trend of statues of cultural celebrities. This comparative inquiry of the three phases is tracing the evolving role of this genre of public images in shaping Kolkata’s visual and political landscapes. The aim is to locate points of overlap and divergence that illuminate the dual role of Kolkata’s public statues as both aesthetic markers and tools of political identity.

Neha Basu

Neha Basu, a Rhode Island native, graduated from Pitzer College with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and sociology. Her honors-level senior thesis was called “The Collection Being More than the Sum of the Parts: The Role of Identity Integration and Racialization in Multiracial Students’ Experiences”, for which she conducted a survey and interviews with multiracial college students. Neha has served as a student representative on the Faculty Executive Committee as a fellow at the Writing Center. In 2023, she was fortunate to collaborate with the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice in street vending research and policy advocacy, which sparked her interest in global street vending regulation as an intersection of various social and political factors. She has received the Kallick Community Service Award in recognition of her work in this area. In the future, Neha plans to attend law school, with the goal of becoming a movement attorney.

Street food vendors are a key part of urban life in India, yet they are excluded from the formal economy and often face restrictive regulations, making vending an interstice of sociopolitical, economic, and legal forces. These come together for street vendors in Kolkata, where such vending falls within the jurisdiction of two recently passed national- and state-level laws designed to regulate the practice. Neha’s Fulbright-Nehru project is utilizing a participatory action methodology to investigate the nature of Kolkata vendors’ interactions and navigations in terms of the law, what the local vending landscape reveals about conceptions of public space, and what it reveals about culture and economic factors.