Archives: Meet Our India Fulbrighters

Snehal Donde

Dr. Snehal Donde is the dean of administrative affairs at the Bhaktivedanta Research Centre, University of Mumbai, located at Govardhan Ecovillage (GEV), Palghar, Maharashtra. She is also the chief research officer of GEV, which has been awarded a United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) award in 2017. She has more than three decades of administrative, teaching, and research experience. She holds a double PhD in zoology and management studies and has successfully guided nine PhD students.

Dr. Donde has received several research grants for projects including one on Ganga River pollution, erosion and sedimentation studies. She has chaired sessions at many prestigious international conferences and has over 80 peer-reviewed research publications to her credit, including nine books. She received the Green Crusader award from the UNEP and India’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change. She is a member of the advisory council of People’s World Commission on Droughts and Floods, Ulrika, Sweden.

In her four months as Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at the City University of New York’s Bronx Community College, Bronx, NY, Dr. Donde will teach courses on environmental science in the Departments of Chemistry, Earth Science and Environmental Sciences. She will also work with the Department of History, particularly with the faculty offering courses on human geography, and provide students with newer perspectives on rural India. She will conduct collective social learning workshops, and seminars on various sustainability initiatives centered around water quality and scarcity, rural development, and climate change resilience.

Sumangala Damodaran

Sumangala Damodaran is a professor of development studies, economics, and popular music studies, with an academic career spanning more than three decades. She has taught for a long time in Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi, and Ambedkar University Delhi. She is now at the Institute of Human Development, New Delhi. She is also a visiting professor at Ashoka University, Haryana.

Prof. Damodaran’s areas of work include industrial organization, labour and the informal sector, global value chains, and gender. She has also researched extensively on the relationship between society and music and produced several music albums. As an academician and performing musician, she has been the recipient of many prestigious grants from India and abroad. She has collaborated with scholars and performers from different countries on academic research and poetry-music performances. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

In her six months as Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, Prof. Damodaran will be engaged in teaching two undergraduate courses in the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Department, working with colleagues in developing course modules, giving lecture-demonstrations around her work in music, and engaging with community organizations such as Ragamala, a music organization in Seattle, for conducting poetry, music and storytelling sessions.

Abhijit Chowdhury

Abhijit Chowdhury is a screenwriter and director, working in the Bengali film and television industry in Kolkata. He has directed independent feature films, short films, and multiple popular and critically acclaimed Bengali web series, such as Manbhanjan, Johny Bonny, Astey Ladies, and Ekenbabu o Dhaka Rohosyo.

Abhijit is a guest lecturer at iLead, Kolkata, and several other institutions in the city, where he teaches filmmaking and screenwriting.

In his seven months as a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, Abhijit will teach a 3-credit undergraduate course on specific aspects of Indian cinema, and also offer a writing course on episodic short-scripts. He will work with the Cinema Studies Department to add more diversity to their current course curriculum. During this time, Abhijit will direct a short film as well, using Drexel University’s production resources, which will offer experiential learning to the students on his crew.

Asha Bajpai

Asha Bajpai began her career at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, where she was one of the founding faculty members. She went on to get her MPhil and PhD in law and has been involved for over three decades in teaching, research, and training on social laws, child rights, gender laws, public health laws, clinical education, law and social work, and legislative reforms. She had also trained law enforcement and judicial officers. As a professor of law, and the founding dean of the School of Law at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, she designed unique LLM courses on access to justice for preparing community lawyers. Prof. Bajpai was the director of field action projects such as the Access to Justice Clinic, and Chunauti – for rehabilitation of children in institutions.

Prof. Bajpai has been invited as amicus curiae and expert advisor by the Mumbai and Delhi High Courts in Public Interest Litigation cases. She has also been invited as a legal expert by UNESCO and by UNODC. She was a Fulbright lecturer at the Washington College of Law, Washington, D.C., and guest lecturer at the University of Warwick, UK, and the University of Westminster, UK. She has several publications, and her book Child Rights in India: Law, Policy and Practice by Oxford University Press is now in its third edition. Her other publications include From Exploitation to Empowerment, and Adoption Law and Justice to the Child.

In her three months as Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at Missouri Western State University, St Joseph, MO, Prof. Bajpai will be teaching a course on comparative child rights law, and clinical street law at the Center for Women and Children.

Vivek Singh

Dr. Vivek Singh is Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. He has taught several courses in English literature, language, and cultural studies at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels; and has taught research writing to Ph.D. scholars. He has also taught at the Department of English, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh. After pursuing his M.Phil. from Pondicherry University, Puducherry, Dr. Singh joined EFL University, Hyderabad to complete his doctorate. His research interests include disability studies, cultural studies, English language teaching, and critical humanities.

Dr. Singh has delivered more than 20 invited lectures on various topics and published more than ten articles and academic papers. He has edited a book titled The Crisis of Humanity and his forthcoming books are in two languages: The Discourse of Disability: Indian Perspectives (English) and Post-truth (Hindi). For excellence in research, he received a DAAD fellowship.

As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Dr. Singh is teaching Hindi at Mississippi Valley State University, Mississippi. He is also studying the American social and cultural diversity and promoting Indian languages and cultures. In the classroom, he is engaging with critical pedagogy, which insists upon deliberation, critical judgment, and civic courage to celebrate pluralities as the essence of democratic thought.

Areeba Shabbir

Dr. Areeba Shabbir has worked with the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, as On-Air Educator for the Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds (SWAYAM) national TV channel. She has also held positions as Guest Faculty at Delhi Skill and Entrepreneurship University in New Delhi, and as Assistant Professor at GLA University in Mathura.

Dr. Shabbir completed her Ph.D. in English language teaching (ELT) from the Department of English, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh. Her research focused on the role of technology in language learning and teaching. During her research, she volunteered for Vision Aid Incorporated USA, and developed and taught spoken English courses to visually impaired individuals. In addition to contributing research papers to journals of high impact, she also actively participated in debates, group discussions, and theatrical performances as a student.

Dr. Shabbir is a teaching assistant in Hindi and Urdu at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. She aims to foster meaningful cultural exchange between both nations. She is promoting various aspects of Indian culture, including art, literature, and values by organizing and participating in cultural events at her host institution. Furthermore, Dr. Shabbir is working on collaborating with artists, cultural centers, and educational organizations in the U.S. to launch joint projects aimed at promoting the richness of Indian culture.

Payal Priya

Ms. Payal Priya is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for English Studies, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has taught several courses in English language and literature at the undergraduate level and has been a language trainer for four years. She is pursuing her doctoral research, after completing her master’s in English literature from St. Xavier’s College, Ranchi, where she was part of an amateur theatre group. She has participated and won accolades in acting and public speaking and is trained in Kathak. Her doctoral research looks at the meaning of the sacral, particularly in Rāmlīlā, and the methods of creating the sacral in a performance. Her work also looks at the memory of the sacral and how it is transformed, transmuted, and transported in urban spaces and with the diaspora through semiotic translations. Her areas of interest are performance studies, memory studies, identity studies, Indian aesthetics, and philosophy.

Ms. Priya has presented her work at several national and international conferences and has published several academic papers. She writes short stories and poems, which have been published in reputable magazines and anthologies. She designed and conducted a workshop on creative writing for Umran, a Delhi based NGO.

As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Ms. Priya is teaching Hindi at the University of Notre Dame. Through this program, she wishes to share the culture of her country, experience another culture, and understand and explore the possibilities of building a more inclusive and accepting world.

Riddhi Pankhadiwala

Ms. Riddhi Pankhadiwala is working as an L-4 language interpreter and a Gujarati translator at Datamark Incorporated. She completed her master’s in English literature from Symbiosis International University, Pune in 2021. She also holds a master’s in Bharatnatyam and a bachelor’s in Indian classical music. In addition, she earned a diploma in gender and cultural studies from Savitribai Phule University, Pune. Throughout her academic journey, Ms. Pankhadiwala has dedicated herself to bringing Indian mythologies, performing arts, and aesthetics together on common ground for her doctoral research. She published a research paper on social voyeurism in Manjula Padmanabhan’s play Lights Out. Her research areas include Indian mythologies, Indian criticism, and performing aesthetics through literature.

Ms. Pankhadiwala works with Asian-Indians as a professional interpreter and translates across more than four languages. She has also been an active member of the English Language Teachers’ Association in Pune for a few years.

As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Ms. Pankhadiwala is teaching Hindi at Yale University. Having experienced a diversity of cultures around the world, she is working on finding a way to intermingle the cultures of the East and the West through performing arts and literature and to bring them to life on a stage. She aspires to utilize her Fulbright experiences to invent new teaching methods amidst the traditional approach of teaching in her own country, and to come up with more hands-on and practice-oriented pedagogies grounded in art and literature.

Krishna Kumar Pandey

Dr. Krishna Kumar Pandey is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the Central Institute of Hindi, Agra. Additionally, he holds the position of Regional Director at the Central Institute of Hindi’s regional center in Shillong, Meghalaya.

In 2020, Dr. Pandey completed his Ph.D. in linguistics at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee. His doctoral research focused on the area of second language acquisition, orthography, spelling errors, and the culture of learning. He obtained his master’s in linguistics from the Department of Linguistics at Banaras Hindu University (BHU). In 2012, Dr. Pandey received the BHU prize for securing the first rank in his bachelor’s in linguistics at BHU. He has published research papers that explore topics such as the culture of learning, the role of English as a second language in India, and the nature and identity of the Devanagari script. Furthermore, he has written articles on language, culture, and identity, which have been published on reputed news platforms.

As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Dr. Pandey is teaching Hindi at the University of Michigan. In this role, he is contributing to the global prominence and growth of Indian languages, particularly Hindi. He intends to integrate the valuable teaching and learning experiences gained from this program into his pedagogical practices upon returning to India. In addition to providing an exceptional platform for teaching and learning, Dr. Pandey views the Fulbright FLTA program as a remarkable opportunity for fostering intercultural exchange.

Chandan Kumar

Dr. Chandan Kumar is Assistant Professor at the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Christ (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru, Karnataka. At the department, he has designed and taught several linguistics courses and establishing the linguistics club ‘Taabiir’. Dr. Kumar completed his Ph.D. in linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in 2020. His doctoral research delved into the morpho-syntactic and semantic aspects of the nominals in underrepresented languages of Bihar in India. Employing a typological approach, his study prioritized functionality while utilizing generative framework to elucidate structural phenomena across languages.

Dr. Kumar has presented and published articles in prestigious national and international conferences and journals. His research interests lie at the intersection of linguistic structure, society, and meta-structure. His recent publication examines the articulated NP/DP structure, specifically focusing on the challenges of definiteness and referentiality in the Magahi language. In 2020, he was awarded an honorarium of USD 1000 for a paper published by Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul and World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., Singapore.

As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Dr. Kumar’s approach to teaching Hindi at the University of Illinois, Chicago revolves around fostering an intercultural learning experience. He strives to create a dynamic classroom environment that encourages students to explore and appreciate the diversity of languages and cultures, while also strengthening their linguistic skills. Dr. Kumar strives to promote multilingual competencies and an open exchange of ideas and practices amongst his students in an inclusive and dynamic classroom.