Presidency University Archives

Amal Mitra

Dr. Amal Mitra is a Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Jackson State University (JSU), Jackson, MS, USA. He obtained his Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) and Master of Public Health (MPH) degrees from University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL. He received his Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) degree from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Prior to joining JSU, he worked as a senior medical officer and associate scientist at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research (icddrb), Bangladesh, where he started his research career in clinical medicine as well as in public health. Dr. Mitra is a recipient of external funding from numerous agencies including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Department of Agriculture (DOA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Susan G. Komen Foundation, the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC). He is also a recipient of many awards including the Lifetime Achievement Award 2013, the Innovation Award for Applied Research 2004, and the Distinguished Faculty Researcher Award 1999.

Dr. Mitra’s Fulbright-Nehru research project focuses on adolescents’ mental health in relation to COVID-19. Demographic data, family history of COVID-19, and any other physical and mental illnesses of the participants (such as depression, anxiety, behavioral changes, sleep disturbances, and addictions) will be collected. The participants will be screened for mental health status using Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ)-9 and Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)-7 scales. The overall impact of human losses due to COVID-19 in West Bengal will be assessed. In addition, Dr. Mitra will offer a graduate-level course on Epidemiology of COVID-19, and hands-on training on statistical analysis of data.

Sarah Pinto

Prof. Sarah Pinto is a Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University. Her research and teaching addresses cultures and histories of biomedicine in South Asia, especially as they pertain to kinship and gender. Most recently she has been working on histories of psychiatry in South Asia, with a focus on diagnoses related to “hysteria.” She is author of three books, Where There Is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural India (Berghahn 2008), Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India (University of Pennsylvania Press 2014), which was awarded the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize for ethnographic writing on gender and health, and The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis (Women Unlimited 2019/Fordham University Press 2020), and numerous scholarly articles. Her current efforts consider concepts of the “good death” as they emerge in and beyond bioethical framings, highly collaborative models for ethnographic research and teaching, and writing at the intersections of ethnography, history, and fiction.

During her Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Pinto intends to involve several interlinked components: teaching a seminar-style workshop for graduate students, conducting preliminary ethnographic research, and building a collaborative research paradigm for ongoing work. The theme of these efforts is contemporary concepts of “good death” in West Bengal. Amid rapid changes in the Indian medical and legal landscape of end-of-life care, Prof. Pinto asks how ideas about a good death are formed and reformed at the juncture of medicine, law, religion, and everyday life. What does a good death look like in and beyond global bioethical formulations?

Hashwinder Singh

Mr. Hashwinder Singh is an aspiring scholar of post-Partition Indian political thought, with a particular focus on the relationship between Nehruvianism and Punjab’s Sikhs. Having recently graduated with a Master’s in Global History from the University of Oxford, and a bachelor‘s from Georgetown University, Mr. Singh is interested in how the state balances its ideological foundations when it pushes against minorities’ ability to engage with their most authentic representation of themselves. Outside of his academic passions, Mr. Singh spends his time reading, watching films and playing basketball.

Through his Fulbright-Nehru project, Mr. Singh seeks to understand the connectivity in discourse between three major periods of Sikh political agitation. Specifically, he is curious about the extent to which there was a coherence in the political rhetoric between Tara Singh (1945-46), Fateh Singh (1962-66) and Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale (1980-84). He wants to understand the perceived shortcomings in Congress governance that led Akali Sikhs to believe that they were being neglected. Were Khalistani’s claims of Congress hegemony inherent to the Nehruvian project? Did Sikhs fulfill a social role akin to the Muslim subaltern in the post-Partition nation-state? In sum, Mr. Singh is probing what constitutes belonging within the Nehruvian nation-state.

Sarah Levenstam

Sarah Levenstam is pursuing a doctoral degree in the anthropology of religion at the University of Chicago, Divinity School, in Chicago, Illinois. She holds an MA in religious studies, also from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, and a dual BA in religious studies and anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. Sarah’s doctoral dissertation examines ideas and practices of dog management and care across India and Britain against the backdrop of imperial and national public works projects, international humanitarianism, and transnational animal welfare movements from 1857 through the present.

At the University of Chicago, Sarah’s research has been generously supported by the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS), the Nicholson Center for British Studies, and the Divinity School. She has received Critical Language Scholarships, Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, COSAS Fellowships, and an American Institute of Indian Studies Scholarship for language studies in Bangla, Urdu, and Sanskrit. She has previously worked in international education at World Learning, in historical and archival research for Hudson Institute, and in accessibility advocacy and community outreach with Rubin Museum of Art and the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions. She also fosters dogs for an animal shelter in Chicago.

Sarah’s Fulbright-Hayes research is tracing the transformation of the legal status of free-roaming dogs from straying “ferae naturae”, contained and culled in 19th-century colonial Calcutta, to legally-recognized “street dogs” who have accrued material and moral value in today’s Kolkata. She is looking at how dogs have inhabited this changing city and how the metrics of evaluating them as valuable or disposable have changed with time. She is also studying what the connected histories of dogs and humans together navigating this city’s public spaces reveal about cross-species hierarchies, practices of place-making, and claims of belonging in Kolkata.