National Law School of India University Archives

Alexandra Blitzer

Alexandra Blitzer is a native of Westport, Connecticut, and a recent graduate from Brown University. She holds a BA in history and early modern world. She is passionate about gender policy, social change, legal studies, human rights, the performing arts, political journalism, and public service.

Prior to her Fulbright grant, Alexandra worked for the White House Gender Policy Council as an intern. She has also worked for Deloitte Consulting, Ernst & Young Climate Change and Sustainability Services, TIME’S UP Now, and the Biden–Harris campaign. Besides, she was the editor-in-chief of the Brown Political Review. She has significant experience living abroad, having spent time in Israel and Italy.

Alexandra has written extensively for the Brown Political Review on varied topics like reproductive rights, social justice, sustainability, and voting. She also wrote an undergraduate thesis, which was awarded honors, titled “Changing the Law, Changing a Community: Lamphere v. Brown University and The Opportunities and Limitations of Legal Remedies for Driving Social Change in the Workplace”. Her thesis was also awarded the Gaspee Chapter Daughters of the American Revolution Award. She is also a Birthright Excel Global Fellow (2021).

Outside of her work, Alexandra enjoys the performing arts, screenwriting, reading, spending time with friends and family, skiing, hiking, and crafting. Following her Fulbright-Nehru grant, she hopes to go to law school and continue her advocacy for women and girls as a policymaker in U.S. and international contexts.

Alexandra’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is bringing together the fields of labor, gender, law, and policy. Her research is focusing on the implementation and enforcement of India’s 2013 law titled “The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, or POSH Act. She is analyzing the benefits India’s economy would realize with the effective enforcement of this law. This project is significant because workplace sexual harassment is prevalent in India and the effective enforcement of the POSH Act would have major implications for the safety and well-being of women and girls, as well as for India’s economy as a whole.

Nitya (Deepa) Das Acevedo

Dr. Deepa Acevedo is a legal anthropologist and a law and society scholar. Her research blends ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological theory with doctrinal and policy analysis to provide new insights into legal rules and institutions. Dr. Acevedo is an associate professor of law at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned her JD and PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago and her BA in politics from Princeton. Her monograph, The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2023. Her articles have been published or are forthcoming in, among others, Law & Social Inquiry, Duke Law Journal, the American Journal of Comparative Law, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the Asian Journal of Law and Society, and Modern Asian Studies. She has also guest-edited several special collections: a pair of issues in Alabama Law Review and Law & Social Inquiry focusing on interdisciplinary engagements between law and anthropology; a virtual issue in Law & Society Review on legal anthropology (with Anna Offit); and a collection on “constitutional ethnography” appearing via ICONnect – the blog of the International Journal of Constitutional Law.

Constitutions are documents for everyday life. Despite this, the study of constitutional law remains largely cabined to rarified contexts, elite actors, and written materials. Dr. Acevedo’s Fulbright-Nehru project is connecting the theoretically weighty field of constitutional law with the nuanced empirical insights afforded by anthropology to show how a diverse collection of Indian actors define, refine, and mobilize their national charter. In particular, Dr. Acevedo’s project is using the recently popular concept of “constitutional morality” to explore how ordinary citizens engage with and mobilize their Constitution.

Samantha Chacko

Samantha Chacko graduated from the University of Southern California (USC) in May 2024 with a major in philosophy, politics, and law, and two minors, one in law and public policy and another in opera. It was through her interdisciplinary coursework that Samantha discovered her passion for law. During her sophomore year, she spent a semester interning with the Esperanza Immigrant Rights Project, where she picked up an interest in advocacy. Inspired by Esperanza’s mission, she spent the following year with JusticeCorps, an AmeriCorps program that provides legal assistance to self-representing litigants. Her research experience includes a summer at Cambridge University comparing the legal aid frameworks of the U.S., India, and the UK. Samantha spent her senior year with USC’s Center for Political Future, conducting multiple public policy research projects addressing political polarization and LA’s housing crisis. She intends to build on these experiences and skills through her Fulbright program. Ultimately, she hopes to attend law school and continue her work in increasing access to legal aid. Samantha held several leadership positions on campus, including being the student ambassador for the Thornton School of Music. She was also elected director of Mehfil for her South Asian fusion a cappella team, Asli Baat. Outside of studies, Samantha enjoys singing and watching Bollywood movies.

Although Indian citizens are constitutionally guaranteed access to legal aid, in the year 2023 only 61 per cent of those seeking legal assistance actually received it. While little research has categorized the access to these services by demographic, one report from 2016 found that only 14 per cent of all litigants in India were women. However, it remains unclear whether women actually receive the legal assistance they are entitled to and if they do, whether the quality of the service is of the required standard. Samantha’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is identifying the factors perpetuating the gender gap in access to Indian courts and thus attempting to inform the universal development of legal aid frameworks.

Ashwini Tambe

Dr. Ashwini Tambe is professor of history and director of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at George Washington University. She is a scholar of gender and law in South Asia and of transnational feminist theory. Over the past two decades, she has written about how South Asian societies regulate sexual practices. Her 2009 book, Codes of Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay (University of Minnesota Press), traces how law-making and law-enforcement practices shaped the rise of the city’s red-light district. Her 2019 book, Defining Girlhood in India: A Transnational Approach to Sexual Maturity Laws (University of Illinois Press), examines the legal paradoxes in age standards for girls’ sexual consent in India. She has also published the co-edited volumes, Transnational Feminist Itineraries (with Millie Thayer) and The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia (with Harald Fischer-Tiné). Her most recent journal articles have appeared in Feminist Formations, American Historical Review, and South Asia. She is also the editorial director of Feminist Studies, the oldest U.S. journal of feminist interdisciplinary scholarship.

Dr. Tambe holds a PhD in international relations from American University, Washington, D.C., and has taught at the University of Maryland and the University of Toronto. She has supervised doctoral dissertations on a wide range of topics, including the history of women’s studies; sports and gender; and religion and sexuality. In 2018, she received the Graduate Mentor of the Year Award from the University of Maryland.

Dr. Tambe’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring feminist debates on appropriate punishment for sexual harm, with a focus on the impact of digital activism. This is an important time in India to pose questions about such punishment since a new legal code, Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, recently replaced the Indian Penal Code. At this time of intense deliberation over regulating gender justice, Dr. Tambe is based in a premier legal education site, the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), researching cases of digital retribution, defamation lawsuits, and caste barriers to seeking justice in cases of sexual violence.