O.P. Jindal Global University Archives

Catherine Ralph

Ms. Catherine Ralph is an innovator, explorer, and collaborator with remarkable drive. She grew up in a small, coastal town in Maine before traveling to California for college where she learned to discover her identity outside of her upbringing. Throughout college, Ralph was exposed not only to new people but also to new experiences and avenues for eliciting positive change within her communities.

Ms. Ralph graduated from Santa Clara University with majors in Economics and Political Science because she was inspired by the connection they had to various realms of her life––e.g., her interest in social entrepreneurship and the role that social entrepreneurs have in solving unjust environmental equilibriums while simultaneously working to address social problems––and the duality that allowed her to showcase both her analytical and mathematical skills.

Through Santa Clara University’s Miller Center Fellowship, Ms. Ralph utilized her academic background in behavioral economics to draw larger conclusions about the impact gender interventions can have, and further, how strategy and policy proposals can maximize that impact. She used her analytical skills to develop a portfolio for Oorja Development Solutions––a social enterprise that finances and installs solar mini-grids in rural communities in Uttar Pradesh for irrigation, agro-processing, and cooling––to overcome hindrances to impact investment opportunities through gender-focused integration strategies.

Ms. Ralph was the President of Santa Clara’s outing club, Into the Wild (ITW). Ms. Ralph led with authenticity and pride for being part of such a spectacular organization that thrives off of participants’ awe when they round the corner into Yosemite Valley for the first time, or their giggles during the first night spent in a tent. ITW shapes students’ trajectories at Santa Clara through its ability to foster intimate communities that span beyond weekend trips.

Ms. Ralph defines success as having a community of friends, family, and mentors who comfort her during hardship, amplify her achievements, and challenge her to push her own boundaries.

Persistent cultural biases against fully including women in the formal economy have hindered economic development. Ms. Ralph’s Fulbright-Nehru research project aims to document the impact social enterprises bringing renewable energy by way of solar mini-grids to farms, have on social and gender attitudes in India. When social enterprises mirror the demographic of farmers, women’s employment increases, extending their individual agency and facilitating more progressive attitudes about gender. By harnessing the power of grassroots interventions, social enterprises will positively impact women’s agency and economic development. The broader impacts of Ms. Ralph’s research encourage social enterprises to implement gender interventions, to increase development and scaling potential.

Zachary Clark

Zachary Clark is a PhD candidate at Pennsylvania State University studying Late Qing and 20th-century Sino-Tibetan borderland history. Zachary received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Connecticut and then lived for over two years in Beijing, teaching English. He received his MA in Asia-Pacific studies from the University of San Francisco where he also worked at the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History. In the past two years, Zachary has been actively studying Chinese and Tibetan languages to gain a more nuanced and historical understanding of the ethnic and cultural diversity in China’s western regions.

Zachary’s research has its spotlight on the Sino-Tibetan borderland (today’s Tibet Autonomous Region, Qinghai, Sichuan, and Yunnan) from the Late Qing dynasty to the early 1950s. Within this region, he focuses on regional governance, sometimes designated as “warlordism”, which lasted for decades and navigated the governance of an ethnically diverse population of Tibetan, Han Chinese, Yi, and Hui Muslims amongst a radically shifting political landscape in both China and Tibet. His research bridges 20th-century Chinese and Tibetan history by foregrounding the interests, cultures, and ethnic groups prevalent in this borderland to better understand the early developments of nationalism, ethnicity, and identity outside of the central Chinese state.

In his free time, Zachary is a Premier League soccer enthusiast. He also enjoys hiking, watching Chinese and Tibetan films, and trying new Tibetan food recipes.

Zachary’s Fulbright-Hays project looks at the Sino-Tibetan region from 1905 to 1955, by focusing on three western provincial and regional capitals: Xining, Kangding, and Kunming. For this, he is using Chinese, English, and Tibetan sources to provide a more holistic, non-state view of the methods that regional government policies enacted on the periphery and the various Tibetan ethnic, political, and religious factors which shaped them. Zachary’s project argues that China’s far west, far from being politically irrelevant to the Chinese state, put forward new visons of modern state-making which shed light on the historical process of China’s transition from empire to nation state.

Lily Bello

Lily Bello is a recent graduate from CUNY’s Brooklyn College where she received a BA in anthropology with a minor in LGBT studies. Her studies focused on qualitative ethnographic research methodologies as well as on transgender cultures and human rights law. She has research experience – funded via internships, academic programs, and research awards – studying activist movements and community landownership. Besides her academic pursuits, Lily has both personal and professional experience in transgender rights activism, including by working with the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, a firm focused on human rights law as it applies to transgender communities. Following her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Lily will be pursuing PhD programs in anthropology to study the relationship between transgender human rights law and the decolonial conceptions of gender-variant identity.

Lily’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the emerging relationship between contemporary personal law and traditional modes of communal housing among hijra and other gender-variant communities. This ethnographic study is taking place in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru in order to account for local cultural differences in the housing practices of these communities. The research is addressing the relationship between legal structures and the social organization of gender-variant communities, and thus contributing to a broader discourse on the application of human rights law to such communities within their local cultural contexts.