Host Institution USA: Jawaharlal Nehru University

Lavanya Nott

Lavanya Nott is a PhD student in geography at UCLA. She has a master’s degree in South Asia studies from Cornell University and a bachelor’s in English literature and mathematics from Bryn Mawr College. She has worked in organizing and research in the area of labor rights in both India and the U.S., most recently, with an organization in Bengaluru on the working conditions in export-oriented manufacturing industries in South India. In the past, her research has been supported by Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, and UCLA-administered grants.

Outside of research, Lavanya is an avid baker and cook, and enjoys playing football with a local club and spending time with her dog, Abacus.

Lavanya’s Fulbright research is exploring past and current projects on food sovereignty in postcolonial India and their entanglements with anti-imperialist internationalist currents across the Third World. Her study is particularly on how struggles around food sovereignty have transformed in response to neoliberalism, and how they relate to broader questions of political and economic sovereignty in the postcolonial world.

Mary Girard

Between 2013 and 2022, Mary Girard visited India – where she grew up (1959–1976) – to research her family’s story in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. She wrote a biography, Among the Original Dwellers: Remembering Ferdinand Hahn (Lulu, 2019), about her great-great-grandfather who went from Germany to British India to work among the Adivasis (tribes) in the plateau jungle region of Chotanagpur; Ferdinand Hahn was a pastor, administrator, educator, ethnologist, linguist, and historian, but it was his fascination with volksgeist (the spiritual essence of a people) that inspired him to collect folktales of the Oraon tribe and write a grammar of their language.

Mary discovered that there was a keen interest among the Adivasis she met as to how she accessed her ancestral story. While she had only some family stories, she found a great deal in archived materials in Germany and around the world. Realizing that such archives do not exist for much of Adivasi history, she started a series of writing workshops to explore how to spark memories and tell everyday stories that become building blocks for historical narratives. This storytelling project was written up as “The Journey of Discovering and Preserving Heritage” in the Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies (2019).

Mary graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and continued to maintain her interest in South Asian history as an independent scholar while working in the nonprofit sector. Throughout her work history, she has relied on the power of storytelling. She has collected whatever literature she could access to research for a novel that would tell a story about the nature of the cross-cultural relationship between the Adivasis and her ancestors. Mary is an avid traveler and enjoys blogging about her travels and journey as a writer.

Anmol Ghavri

Anmol Ghavri is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a 2023-2024 US Fulbright-Nehru Scholar affiliated with the Centre for Historical Studies at JNU. He focuses on the history of modern South Asia as well as global histories of capitalism, political economy, and economic life. He is especially interested in the history of India’s modern market economy and society. At Michigan he has been an instructor in courses covering all periods of South Asian history. His Fulbright and doctoral research is on the history of vernacular capitalism and enterprise of agrarian communities in north India adapting to the uneven economic transformations of the twentieth century. It seeks to pluralize our understanding of the lineage of capitalism and the institutions, contradictions, and contestations characteristic of modern India’s economy. He received his BA in History from Dartmouth College with High Honors in 2018 and master’s degrees from Columbia University and the London School of Economics in 2020.

Brock DeMark

Brock DeMark is a PhD student at Indiana University (IU), Bloomington, studying modern Indian history, British colonial/imperial history, and urban development. Before his doctoral coursework, Brock lived in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he completed his bachelor’s degree in history and English literature at the University of Arkansas in 2019. At IU, Brock has served as the leader of its History Department’s Graduate Student Association. He organized a national conference for history graduate students in Bloomington in 2022. Brock is also active in IU’s Dhar India Studies Program, practicing his Hindi at weekly conversation table meetings, attending Hindi and Urdu movie events, and composing poems in Hindi. Besides, Brock spent the summer of 2022 in Jaipur, India, studying Hindi under the Critical Language Scholarship Program.

Brock’s dissertation research is an urban history project that examines the “fabrication” of Kanpur, India – a global industrial hub – in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The word “fabrication” denotes both “invention” and a “process of constructing, fashioning, and manufacture”. Attentive to the ways in which Kanpur was “fabricated” in both senses of the word – how it was invented as a place that people would be interested in going to find work or investing money, as well as the processes and relationships that led to the construction of the city’s material infrastructure – Brock’s project seeks to make a unique contribution to the scholarly understandings of habitability and community-formation during the colonial period. Brock’s dissertation is drawing on written sources in English and Hindi located in the libraries and archives of Kanpur, Lucknow, Delhi, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

When he is not researching, writing, or reading about Indian history, Brock enjoys hiking, playing basketball, reading popular astronomy articles, and drinking lassi with his partner, Savannah.

Brock’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining the growth and development of Kanpur from 1870 to 1930. The primary goal is to understand how uneven relationships of power between European industrialists, municipal officials, and Indian residents shaped the design of the city. A relatively small commercial mart and military depot that expanded rapidly during the first few decades of the Crown rule, Kanpur grew up alongside the colonial state itself. As such, Kanpur offers a unique insight into the discrepancies between what the colonial state claimed about its development projects versus their impact on the everyday life of Indian residents.

John Portz

Prof. John Portz is a professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. His research interests include education policy, federalism, and institutional leadership, and his teaching areas cover urban politics, intergovernmental relations, public policy, and public administration. In one major research project, he joined a team of scholars analyzing the development of civic capacity in support of public education in major U.S. cities. Based on this project, he co-authored City Schools and City Politics: Institutions and Leadership in Pittsburgh, Boston, and St. Louis (University Press of Kansas, 1999). Focusing on leadership, in another co-authored project he worked with a colleague to identify and explore six common practices of leader-managers in the public sector (Leader-Managers in the Public Sector: Managing for Results, M. E. Sharpe, 2010). More recently, he has focused on educational governance and accountability in K-12 education. Of particular interest are variations in how accountability is achieved, depending upon the institutional setting: administrative, market, professional, and political. Each setting offers a different accountability design. In addition, these designs vary across American federalism based upon different perspectives or lenses at the national, state, and local levels. This project led to a recent publication of his, Educational Accountability and American Federalism: Moving Beyond a Test-Based Approach (Routledge, 2023). In addition to his research activities, Prof. Portz has served at Northeastern University as chair of the Political Science Department and director of the University Honors Program. Outside of academia, he has served as an elected member of his home community’s school board and city council.

In his Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Portz is combining teaching, advising, and research. This includes giving guest lectures on special topics in American politics and policymaking, providing guest presentations in classes, and advising students on research projects. The political and policy dynamics of federalism in the U.S. and India is of particular interest. The research component of his project is an extension of his recent work on educational accountability, focusing on the dynamics of accountability at the elementary and secondary education levels (up to age 18) in India in comparison to the U.S.

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.