Host Institution USA: Jawaharlal Nehru University

Pamela Lothspeich

Dr. Pamela Lothspeich is associate professor of South Asian studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she has been teaching since 2008. She is a literary scholar and cultural historian whose work intersects with epic studies, performance studies, gender studies, and postcolonial studies. She has published extensively on modern iterations of Indian epics, particularly as they appear in Hindi literature, theatre, and film. Her previous research project was on the Radheshyam Ramayan and the theatre of Ramlila. Her books include Epic Nation: Reimagining the Mahabharata in the Age of Empire (OUP, 2009) and the co-edited volume, Mimetic Desires: Impersonation and Guising across South Asia (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022). She has also guest-edited the special issue, “The Field of Ramlila”, in the Asian Theatre Journal (Spring 2020).

Formerly, she taught at Michigan State University (2004–08) and Chicago University (2003– 04). She holds a PhD in South Asian studies and comparative literature from Columbia University (2003) and an MA in Asian languages and literature from the University of Washington (1996).

Dr. Lothspeich’s research project is on Raslila, an Indian performance genre spanning theatre, dance, music, and ritual, which enacts stories about the Hindu god Krishna and the goddess Radha. Many stories in the tradition emphasize Krishna’s youthful antics and loving interactions with his devotees. Raslila is related to other forms of devotional theatre, especially the Ramlila centered on the Hindu god Ram. This project aims to provide fresh insights into Raslila in all its material social, political, and aesthetic contexts, and also into its intertwined history with Ramlila.

Seton Uhlhorn

Seton Uhlhorn is a PhD candidate in South Asian studies at Harvard University. She received her BA with honors from the University of Texas at Austin, graduating from the rigorous Hindi-Urdu Flagship Program. Passionate about language studies, Seton works in Urdu, Hindi, and Persian. She has received numerous fellowships and grants to conduct advanced language training and archival research in India, including from the American Institute of Indian Studies and Boren Awards. Her doctoral research is on the work of the 18th-century poet and grammarian, Insha Allah Khan Insha. Currently, she serves as the teaching fellow for Hindi and Urdu and as the co-chair of the South Asian Studies Colloquium at Harvard University.

In her Fulbright-Nehru research project, Seton is studying the collected ghazals of Insha Allah Khan Insha. She is carrying out her research in Delhi, one of the historical capitals of Urdu literary culture, in affiliation with Jawaharlal Nehru University at the Centre of Indian Languages under the supervision of Professor Muhammad Asif Zahri, who specializes in pre-modern Indo-Muslim literary culture. In the modern view on Urdu literary tradition, the genre of ghazal is limited to a narrow set of themes, characters, and settings. While it is true that this set of themes forms the common generic ground across time, it fails to recognize the many attempts to expand the genre, particularly in the 18th century. Insha is perhaps the most deliberate about pushing the boundaries of the genre, garnering recognition in the early 19th century both inside and outside the royal courts. However, his contributions to Urdu literature have largely been overlooked in the last two centuries. Through her research on Insha ghazals, which employ the use of novel settings, characters, and colloquial language particular to the late 18th and early 19th centuries, she is exploring the ways in which his literary experimentations were informed by shifting political powers, an emerging middle class, and a budding cosmopolitan culture in North India.

Ariana Pemberton

Ariana Pemberton is a PhD candidate in the History of Art department at the University of California (UC), Berkeley. Her dissertation is on ivory-carved objects from South Asia and on the Indian Ocean ivory trade, from the eighth to fifteenth centuries. Part of her research includes testing ivory objects using peptide mass fingerprinting analyses, which determine the provenance of the ivory to the species level. Ariana presented parts of her dissertation research at the Getty Graduate Symposium in January 2024 and at the University of Toronto in May 2024.

She also teaches an undergraduate course at UC Berkeley that focuses on art and material culture from the Indian Ocean World, ca. 700–1500 CE. Previously, she delivered lectures to upper-division undergraduates on “Bronze, Ivory, and Dragon’s Blood: Making the Middle Ages in the Indian Ocean World”. Ariana has also worked as a graduate student instructor in Asian Art at UC Berkeley.

In 2022, she completed her MA thesis on the Firuz Minar, a brick-and-basalt minaret built in Bengal during the 15th century, which today stands as the oldest extant monument in India patronized by an African ruler. Ariana presented this thesis at the Annual Conference on South Asia at the University of Madison, Wisconsin (October 2022), and at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Honolulu (March 2022). She completed her bachelor’s in art history from UC Berkeley in 2017. She has also conducted extensive fieldwork in India and has been a student of Hindi and Sanskrit.

Ivory was one of the most enigmatic materials in medieval South Asia: religious icons were carved out of ivory; rulers sat on ivory thrones; medical practitioners prescribed ivory for ailments; men and women lay on aphrodisiac ivory beds; and ivory chess pieces circulated across the Eurasian world. However, the centrality of this material transformed it into a global bio-commodity, setting into motion an ecological process that led to the endangerment of elephants. In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Ariana is writing a longue durée ecological art history of South Asian ivory.

Chandler Compton

Chandler Compton is a North Carolina native raised on his family’s farm near Chapel Hill. At Wofford College, he majored in international affairs and English, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He played on the men’s soccer team while also serving the college’s honor council and tutoring students at the library’s writing center. As a junior, he directed and hosted the college’s first-ever TEDx conference. He has also studied in Prague, Czechia.

After college, Chandler served as a logistics officer in the United States Marine Corps. Stationed at both Mount Fuji and Okinawa, Japan, his role involved leading the Marines in logistics operations and collaborating with partners across the Indo-Pacific region. His firsthand experience working in this dynamic international environment solidified his interest in international affairs and regional cooperation.

Chandler enjoys traveling to new countries, reading history, and going snowboarding whenever possible. He is a passionate supporter of the Atlanta Braves and Everton Football Club. When not following sports or being with friends, he is likely to be found at the gym or playing pick-up sports at the nearest basketball court or soccer field.

Chandler’s Fulbright-Nehru research is focusing on India’s potential leadership role in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) to strengthen Indo-Pacific supply chains. His project is identifying collaborative strategies for Quad members to build resilient multilateral supply chains in the region. Considering India’s strategic location, growing economic influence, and access to critical trade routes, Chandler argues the country is uniquely positioned to spearhead the Quad leadership in fortifying the Indo-Pacific economic infrastructure and promoting regional stability and sustainable development while mitigating the impact of disruptions in the global economy.

Shalini Ayyagari

Prof. Shalini Ayyagari is an associate professor of music at the University of Pittsburgh and an ethnomusicologist who works across the fields of music in cultural contexts, South Asian studies, critical ethnography, and development studies.

Her first book, Music Resilience: Performing Manganiyar Music in the Indian Thar Desert, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2022, and is based on 15 years of ethnographic fieldwork and primary sources research. Musical Resilience is a sociocultural history and musical ethnography of the Manganiyar, a hereditary community of caste-based musicians who live in the Thar Desert on the India–Pakistan border and have maintained music within a patronage system as their livelihood for centuries. In the book, Prof. Ayyagari chronicles the ways hereditary professional musicians in South Asia continue to make a relevant living through music despite postcolonial rearrangements of traditional patronage relationships and despite economic hardships and the lure of more lucrative non-music professions.

Prof. Ayyagari was previously on the faculty at American University. Before that, she held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at Dartmouth College and a Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation/Teaching Predoctoral Fellowship at Kenyon College. She received her PhD in music with a focus on ethnomusicology from the University of California, Berkeley, where her dissertation research was partially funded by a Fulbright IIE fellowship. She completed her BA from Swarthmore College.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Ayyagari is centering the voices and music of the Manganiyar through collaboration, curation, and the archiving of their ethnographic video, audio, and written materials. She is also piecing together the archival materials (1965–2003) of the late Komal Kothari, the main cultural entrepreneur who took these musicians and their music to the world outside their villages. This archive was recently digitized at the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology (ARCE). Prof. Ayyagari is also working with the Manganiyar musicians to tell their own stories through transmediated filmmaking as practice for co-authorship and collaboration.