Kuvempu Institute of Kannada Studies Archives

Nancy Neiman

Prof. Nancy Neiman has been a Professor of Politics at Scripps College since 1994. She has won numerous teach, scholarship and community service awards. She has taught a wide range of political economy courses including, Markets and Politics in Latin America, the Power Elite: Surveying the Influence of Business over Public Policy, and Infrastructures of Justice. Prof. Neiman teaches a Political Economy of Food course through which she has organized a number of community engagement projects that bridge theory and practice among which are a social enterprise organized with women who were formerly incarcerated, a program called Plant Justice with students at an alternative high school, and a Meatless Monday program that brings students and women who were formerly incarcerated together to share prepare and share meals and food justice programming. She also teaches Napier intergenerational learning courses and Inside-Out courses inside a local prison. Her most recent book, Markets, Community and Just infrastructures, includes a variety of case studies, including an interfaith coffee cooperative in Uganda, Cuban financial reform, globalization in Juárez Mexico, and the US meatpacking industry, to provide a framework for understanding the conditions under which markets promote or undermine social justice.

Focusing on pastoralist women in Gujarat India, the Fulbright-Nehru project of Prof. Neiman intends to track several key coping strategies and practices during Covid-19 among Gujarati pastoralist communities during the pandemic: the struggle over access to grazing lands and the ability to maintain traditional livelihoods, access to healthcare, navigating women’s traditional roles and their role as leaders, and promoting agrarian citizenship. Using qualitative data analysis gathered from interviews and quantitative ARCGIS survey data tracking pastoralist migratory patterns and community welfare, this project hypothesizes that pastoralist identities in Gujarat support, and are supported by, a broader transformational food sovereignty movement.

Christopher LaMountain

Mr. Christopher LaMountain is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he pursued a double major in Religious Studies and Music Performance Studies. After being awarded an Undergraduate Research Grant from Northwestern in 2018, Mr. LaMountain completed a multi-media research project comparing gynecological texts of Mediterranean Antiquity with Marian narratives of the New Testament Apocrypha. In the latter portion of his collegiate career, Mr. LaMountain conducted research on devotional music at seven of the eight continental Baha’i Houses of Worship as the 2019 Northwestern Circumnavigator grantee. Having sung in choirs and as a classically trained tenor soloist, Mr. LaMountain also sung with the musicians of Baha’i Temples around the world and subsequently produced his honors undergraduate thesis comparing the musical styles and presentation forms of devotional music at the different Baha’i Temples. With the help of his colleagues from the Bienen School of Music, Mr. LaMountain has also presented two concert lectures on his comparative Baha’i musicological studies, which featured musical excepts from his worldwide research trip. Interested in inter-religious musicology and cross-cultural studies, Mr. LaMountain has achieved proficiency in French, Italian, and Hindi, passed upper-level courses on various traditions of the major world religions, and studied musical traditions, such as Negro Spiritual, Western Classical, Hindustani, Ugandan traditional, and Nueva Cancion Chilena musical styles. Mr. LaMountain aspires to pursue a graduate degree in sacred music studies, become a religious studies and musicology professor, and continue singing in choirs over the course of his life.

With his Fulbright-Nehru project, Mr. LaMountain is both observing and participating in the process of devotional music making at the prayer services of the Asian Baha’i House of Worship, called the Lotus Temple. In comparing both these observed musical styles and presentational forms of the Lotus Temple with other faith spaces in Delhi, for example Akshardham and ISKCON Temples, Gurudwara Bangla Sahib, Myanmar Buddha Temple, and Moti Masjid, Mr. LaMountain is determining the manner in which local worship music from religious traditions outside of the Baha’i Faith influences intonation of the Lotus Temple.

Christian James

Mr. Christian James is a PhD Candidate in Indiana University’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. His dissertation examines the role of musical performance in internationally funded human development initiatives operating within the Kangra District of Himachal Pradesh.

For over a decade, Mr. James has studied cultures and languages of North India with a special interest in folksongs of western Himachal Pradesh and Greater Punjab. He is proficient in four South Asian languages: Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and the Kangri dialect of Western Pahari. He has received multiple awards and fellowships for language and area studies, including two Critical Language Scholarships. With support from the U.S. Department of Education and Indiana University’s Center for the Study of Global Change, Mr. James spent the 2021-2022 academic year enrolled as the sole student in the first ever Kangri language course offered through the American Institute of Indian Studies.

Alongside his dissertation topic, Mr. James’ research interests include language ideology, public folklore, and Indic musicology. In 2021, the Midwestern Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology awarded him the JaFran Jones prize in recognition of his paper, “Nādānusandhān: Sound Studies and its Lexical Genealogy in Hindi-language Music Scholarship.” Mr. James has worked as an Articles Editor for Folklore Forum, the open-access journal of Folklore and Ethnomusicology Publications (also known as Trickster Press). In 2020, he served Traditional Arts Indiana as a contributor and editor for Memory, Art, & Aging, a public-facing resource guide encouraging older adults and elder care workers to engage with folk and traditional arts.

Mr. James has maintained an abiding passion for music throughout his life. In 2014, he completed a Bachelor’s of Music degree in composition from Oberlin Conservatory. His compositions have featured in several international venues, including the Charlotte New Music Festival in North Carolina (2013), Dharamshala International Film Festival in Himachal Pradesh (2014), and the Syndicate for the New Arts in Ohio (2017). He has worked as a choral singer, music educator, and church music director in Ohio and Indiana as well as his home state of Michigan.

Mr. James’ Fulbright-Nehru project investigates the role of participatory song in the feminist social development work of Jagori Rural Charitable Trust, a non-governmental organization operating in the Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh. Through a combination of participant observation, recorded interview, and audiovisual documentation, Mr. James assesses the effects of collective singing on the delivery of the organization’s objectives concerning the social, economic, and political empowerment of women and girls. The final report documents and analyzes the organization’s total song repertoire, the effects of specific songs, and participants’ experiences of those effects through performance.

Gil Ben-Herut

Dr. Gil Ben-Herut is an associate professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. He holds a PhD in religious studies from Emory University and a BA and MA from Tel Aviv University in Israel. His research interests include premodern religious literature in the Kannada language, South Asian bhakti (devotional) traditions, translation in South Asia, and programming in digital humanities.

His book, Śiva’s Saints: The Origins of Devotion in Kannada according to Harihara’s Ragaḷegaḷu (Oxford University Press, 2018), is the first study in English of the earliest Śaiva hagiographies in the Kannada-speaking region, and it argues for a reconsideration of the development of devotionalism as associated today with the Vīraśaivas. The book received the Best First Book Award for 2019 from the Southeastern Medieval Association and the 2020 Best Book Award from the Southeastern Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. Dr. Ben-Herut also received the Faculty Outstanding Research Achievement Award from the University of South Florida for the year 2020.

Dr. Ben-Herut recently completed co-translating selections from the Ragaḷe hagiographical collection for a book-length publication (under review). This project is funded by the American Academy of Religion’s Collaborative International Research Grant. His publications include a co-translation of a twelfth-century Kannada treatise about poetics, encyclopedic entries, a co-edited volume, book chapters, and peer-reviewed articles. Dr. Ben-Herut is the co-founder of the Regional Bhakti Scholars Network, a platform for facilitating scholarly conversations about South Asian devotional traditions.

Utilizing his extensive experience in computer programming, Dr. Ben-Herut also leads several digital humanities projects, including digital ROSES and BHAVA. He is a member of the Digital India Learning Committee of the American Institute of Indian Studies and an active collaborator in digital projects about South Asian texts and languages involving open-source and open-access environments.

The textual “biography” of the vachana corpus – an expanding collection of devotional and lyrical poetry in Kannada from the twelfth century – spans over several key moments in the history of South India, starting with an innovative devotional practice of personal oral proclamations and then developing into a written canon that served as the fulcrum for a new religious sect, until finally becoming a cultural tool for biting social critique in the modern period. Dr. Ben-Herut’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining how, nine centuries after their appearance, the vachanas became the most cherished literature in Kannada and an exemplar of sorts for spiritual poetry around the world.