Host Institution USA: Madras Institute of Development Studies

Theo Whitcomb

Mr. Theo Whitcomb is a writer and journalist from Southern Oregon. He has covered land use and natural resource politics for over two years, focusing on water, law enforcement, and cannabis agriculture. His writing has been published in national and regional magazines. In 2019, while in India, he began researching and writing about river restoration and land use in Chennai – a subject topic which the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship will continue to support this year.

While in South India for the second time, Mr. Whitcomb is interested in understanding how multinational companies, local social movements, and investors are shaping the politics, economics, and ecology of the region. His research will focus on studying the challenges and politics of Chennai to navigate a disaster-prone climate. To do this, he will work with scholars at the Madras Institute for Development Studies.

Working with scholars at Chennai’s Madras Institute for Development Studies, Mr. Whitcomb’s Fulbright-Nehru research focuses on the politics and infrastructure of ‘climate adaptation.’ He is interested in how multinational companies and international development investment is shaping the politics, economics, and ecology of the Coromandel coast.

Mark Balmforth

Dr. Mark Balmforth is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. His work analyses inherited inequality in histories of encounter between South Asians, Europeans, and Americans. His first book project, titled “Schooling the Master: Caste Supremacy and American Education in British Ceylon,” charts the entwining of caste, nation, and gender in American missionary schools in Ceylon and was awarded the History of Education Society’s 2021 Claude A. Eggertsen Prize. Dr. Balmforth’s second major research project, tentatively titled “Buried Legacies: Slavery and Caste in the Indian Ocean,” rethinks connections between enslavement, caste, and migration in the Indian Ocean by tracing the 300-year odyssey of an oppressed-caste Tamil community from the 17th to the 20th centuries. His work has been published in the History of Education Quarterly, Review of Development & Change, CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion, and the International Journal of Asian Christianity.

Legacies of slavery shape conversations around the world about contemporary social and economic injustice. Over the last decade, scholars of South Asia have started to consider slavery’s impact on contemporary lives in the subcontinent, countering the dominant public and scholarly reliance upon terms like “bonded labor” or “agrestic servitude.” Contributing to the ongoing global conversation about slavery’s legacy, Dr. Balmforth’s Fulbright-Nehru project asks: what can the history of Dalit dye root-digging communities in India reveal about the intertwined careers of slavery and caste in South Asia?

Preetha Mani

Dr. Preetha Mani received her BA from Tufts University and her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Mani is associate professor of South Asian literatures in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) and core faculty member in the program in comparative literature at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method (Northwestern University Press and Permanent Black, 2022). Her research expertise lies in modern Hindi, Tamil, and Indian literatures, and she has published widely on issues of translation, women’s writing, and feminism in India; literary realism and modernism; postcolonial studies; and world literature. She has also published translations of Hindi and Tamil literature, autobiography, and criticism into English. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, American Institute of Indian Studies, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Fulbright.

Dr. Mani’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining Tamil new poetry, a form of modernist free verse that became popular in 1950s’ magazines and set a benchmark against which later poets defined their work. By the 1980s, new poetry writing had democratized the poetic form. Exploring new poetry’s development in print culture, she is proposing that this genre was a primary avenue for writers to cross ideological boundaries and to draw inspiration from each other and from writers in other Indian and world languages. Dr. Mani’s research is attempting to demonstrate that rather than being a linguistic outlier to the national canon, Tamil new poetry was a means for generating ideas for a postcolonial pan-Indian literature built on the poetic form.