Niveditha Senthilvel is a doctoral candidate in South Asian history at Boston University. She is an accomplished scholar whose academic interests lie at the intersection of environment, indigeneity, and security/criminalization. She is passionate about interrogating the parallel processes of state enclosure upon Indigenous peoples and the environments they steward, starting from the nineteenth century.
Prior to being a 2026–2027 Fulbright-Nehru Scholar, Niveditha was awarded the North American Conference on British Studies’ pre-dissertation fellowship in 2025 for her work on exploring the usage of the word “tribe” in the South Asian context. As an undergraduate, her senior capstone thesis on U.S. intervention in the 1943 Bengal Famine won the Jesse Fant Evans Prize for Best Senior Thesis from the George Washington University. Between her undergraduate and graduate careers, she worked across the government, nonprofit, and private sectors applying her research skills to the most compelling strategic challenges facing the world.
Between 1871 and 1949, hundreds of communities throughout South Asia were categorized as “criminal tribes” by the British Indian government, and they were surveilled and forcibly transferred to “reform settlements.” Niveditha’s Fulbright-Nehru project is documenting this history of forced settlement and “reform” policies targeting Indigenous populations across South Asia, with a particular focus on such settlements and residential schools in the Madras Presidency in southern India. Through this study, she hopes to contribute to the global conversation on the rights of Indigenous peoples, environmental degradation, and the responsibilities of contemporary governments in confronting histories of injustice.