Other Fulbright Grants USA: Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program (DDRA)

Rebecca Waxman

Ms. Rebecca Waxman is a PhD candidate at UCLA in the Department of History, specializing in South Asia and with a concentration in gender studies. Her work aims to study occurrences of sexual and gender-based violence that marked turning-point moments in colonial and postcolonial Indian social, political, and feminist histories. Ms. Waxman received her BA in history with a certificate in South Asian Studies from Wesleyan University in 2016, where she wrote her honors thesis historicizing the Delhi Gang Rape of 2012. Her work has been published in Women’s History Review and A Cultural Encyclopedia of Lost Cities and Civilizations (forthcoming).

Ms. Waxman’s dissertation project historicizes the relationship between the interpersonal, violent act of rape and the broader Indian society and politics, exploring how colonial categories and dynamics shaped understandings and legislation of female sexuality and of sexualized violence in British and independent India. It also studies the continuities and discontinuities between colonial and postcolonial India regarding rape. Ms. Waxman’s research endeavors to illuminate key nodes in the complex heterogeneous history of sexual violence in modern South Asia in order to recuperate the subjecthood of Indian women who enter the archive in moments of violation; it also aims to question the dominant knowledge structures informing the subjugation of women.

Carolisa Watson

Ms. Carolisa Watson is currently pursuing a PhD in geography at the University of Kansas. Her research revolves around questions of placemaking, home, and identity. She is engaged in collaborative ethnographic work with displaced communities. Ms. Watson has previously received FLAS funding to study Tibetan, Mongolian, and Chinese languages. She holds bachelor’s degrees in East Asian languages and literatures and in global and international studies from the University of Kansas; she also holds an MA in folklore and ethnomusicology from Indiana University.

Ms. Watson’s Fulbright-Hays project is examining how Tibetan identity is expressed through placemaking in Dharamsala and the ways in which place and identity interact. As a visiting scholar, Ms. Watson is involved in archival and ethnographic fieldwork exploring the relationships between Tibetans, Dharamsala, and the governmental organizations, and how they impact the Tibetan diaspora in Dharamsala; the project is being carried out by studying the historical, contemporary, political, and social contexts of “territorialized exile” in a city. It is also drawing upon an interdisciplinary background in geography, folklore, religious studies, and media studies to understand how individuals interact with their larger communities and the city itself to create meaningful places and express collective and individual identity.

Meher Ali

Ms. Meher Ali is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University. At Princeton, she has been an organizer for the South Asia Graduate Workshop and the South Asia Digital Humanities Working Group, as well as a co-founder of the South Asia Translation Workshop. She was previously a Fulbright student researcher in Kolkata, India, and her work has also been supported by the AIIS language fellowship, the CLS program, and the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies. She received her MA from the University of Chicago and her BA in history with honors from Brown University.

Ms. Ali’s dissertation project traces the history of the public university and higher education in modern South Asia. By taking a capacious definition of the university — as, for example, a product of state policy, an icon of modernity, a material campus, and a site for politicization — her research engages multiple historiographical fields and methods including the history of global development, urban history, architectural history, oral and social history, and ethnographies of the state.

Michael (Donagh) Coleman

Michael (Donagh) Coleman holds degrees in philosophy and psychology (BA) and in music and media technologies (MPhil) from Trinity College Dublin, and an MA in Asian studies from UC Berkeley. He is currently a PhD candidate in medical anthropology at UC Berkeley where his dissertation research focuses on Tibetan Buddhist tukdam deaths and their Tibetan and scientific figurations. Donagh was a 2022 Dissertation Fellow at the ACLS/Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies. He has also worked as a documentary filmmaker and made award-winning films with wide international festival and TV exposure like Tukdam: Between Worlds (2022), A Gesar Bard’s Tale (2013), and Stone Pastures (2008). Donagh’s films have also been shown at museums such as MoMA and the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, and by the European Commission.

In the state of tukdam, the bodies of meditators do not show usual signs of death for days or even weeks after clinical death. According to Tibetan Buddhists, the practitioners are resting in a subtle state of consciousness and are still in the process of dying. Donagh’s Fulbright-Hays project is juxtaposing Tibetan and biomedical understandings of death and tukdam, with a particular focus on a scientific study of tukdam in Tibetan settlements in India. He is looking at issues of incommensurability between Indo-Tibetan and scientific views, related questions of consciousness, and the cultural power that science may exert over Tibetan Buddhist knowledge and its formulations in this context.

Gokul Sampath

Gokul Sampath is a doctoral student in the International Development Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research broadly centers on understanding and overcoming barriers to safe and reliable water access to all in the developing world. Currently, Gokul’s work focuses on strategies to address exposure to dangerous drinking water contaminants in rural India, especially arsenic in groundwater.

Prior to joining MIT, Gokul worked as a senior research associate at Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), running randomized evaluations to measure the effectiveness of programs to reduce groundwater consumption in the drought-prone areas of western India. Gokul was a Fulbright-Nehru Student Researcher from 2014–2015 at A.N. College in Patna, Bihar. He completed his MA in Middle East, South Asian, and African studies at Columbia University, and his BS at the University of California, Davis.

Arsenic in groundwater is a major public health threat in eastern India. Lakhs of rural households are at elevated risk of cancer, stroke, and heart disease from exposure to arsenic in their primary drinking water source: the handpump tube wells on their home premises. Gokul’s Fulbright research is focusing on the social determinants of arsenic exposure in rural West Bengal. He is seeking to explain why households might choose an unsafe water source even when safe alternatives exist in their communities. By better understanding the constraints and norms that shape water-fetching decisions, he hopes to highlight ways to reduce arsenic exposure.

Lavanya Nott

Lavanya Nott is a PhD student in geography at UCLA. She has a master’s degree in South Asia studies from Cornell University and a bachelor’s in English literature and mathematics from Bryn Mawr College. She has worked in organizing and research in the area of labor rights in both India and the U.S., most recently, with an organization in Bengaluru on the working conditions in export-oriented manufacturing industries in South India. In the past, her research has been supported by Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, and UCLA-administered grants.

Outside of research, Lavanya is an avid baker and cook, and enjoys playing football with a local club and spending time with her dog, Abacus.

Lavanya’s Fulbright research is exploring past and current projects on food sovereignty in postcolonial India and their entanglements with anti-imperialist internationalist currents across the Third World. Her study is particularly on how struggles around food sovereignty have transformed in response to neoliberalism, and how they relate to broader questions of political and economic sovereignty in the postcolonial world.

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.

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.

Erin Burke

Erin Burke is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.

Erin holds a BS/BA in anthropology and religious studies from the College of Charleston as well as an MA in religious studies from the University of Virginia. Her interests include the intersection of universal and indigenous religious traditions, definitions of secular and religious, and the role of imagination in religious practice and literature. She has been studying Tibetan language in Tibet, Nepal, and the United States for over 15 years. She has also conducted research in Tibet and Nepal on Tibetan literature and practice and is in the process of producing translations of religious and creative Tibetan stories.

In her Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, Erin is exploring the perspectives on the production and interpretation of Tibetan fiction by discussing late 20th-century and contemporary Tibetan short stories with Tibetan writers, publishers, and librarians. Her project is delving into how Tibetan short stories contribute to the modern Tibetan religious imagination. By identifying continuities with literary Buddhist and oral vernacular expressions, this project is shedding light on popular modes of religious thought that have been marginalized in the scholarship on Tibetan Buddhism. Erin is also studying how Tibetan literary narratives written by lay people foreground multivocal religious world views that do not often appear in normative Buddhist texts. In her discussions with Tibetan authors and intellectuals in Dharamshala, India, she is also investigating the ways in which the first popularly accessible literature in Tibetan history contributes to the ongoing development of Tibetan Buddhism.

Alyssa Heinze

Alyssa Heinze is a PhD Candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. She researches gendered understandings of: the political economy of local development; political inequality; and the consequences of climate change. She is a two-time Fulbright fellowship recipient. Alyssa holds an MSc in economics from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a BA in political science and South Asian studies from Dartmouth College. She has worked for the Impact Data and Evidence Aggregation Library project at the World Bank; she was part of the Research, Evaluation and Data Team at IDinsight and of the Women’s Economic Empowerment Unit at the U.S. Department of State. She has also done stints with Vera Solutions in Mumbai, India, and with Chhori in Kathmandu, Nepal.

 

In her Fulbright-Hays project, Alyssa is examining how state policies – community water governance and drought relief programs – can mitigate the gender inequalities caused by drought. She hypothesizes that women’s inclusion in these policies is pivotal for the prevention of drought-induced gender inequality. Alyssa’s study is located in Maharashtra, India, a region susceptible to the adverse effects of drought. Employing a mixed-methods approach, she is gathering qualitative and quantitative data to assess the causal relationship between state intervention, drought, and gender inequality. This study is expected to inform policy formulation on increasing the resilience of climate-vulnerable communities across India.