USA Fellows Year: U.S. Fellows 2023-2024

Kathleen O’Reilly

Dr. Kathleen O’Reilly is a professor in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M University and is its presidential impact fellow. She has over 25 years of research experience in gender, and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) interventions in rural and urban India. She is trained as a feminist geographer, ethnographer, and South Asia scholar. Her qualitative research on gender norms has identified new information regarding the negative influence of these norms on physical, environmental, social, and sexual stressors related to WASH. Over the course of her career, she has sought an in-depth understanding of internal community and household dynamics when it comes to control and access to resources, like time and toilets, for women and the socially marginalized groups. Her research highlights the need to understand the complexities of social relations and sanitation policy as they pertain to spatial patterns of inequality in WASH. Recently, she created and taught short workshops on best practices for research on sensitive topics based on her ethnographic research in India. Her work has been funded by, among others, the National Science Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She has also published in such prestigious journals as Geoforum, Health & Place, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, Environment & Urbanization, Water Security, and World Development.

In rural India, where conditions require women’s intensive, unpaid domestic work, it is urgent to study how it reproduces gender inequality; this will also add to the global knowledge on unpaid labor’s gendered impact. Dr. O’Reilly’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the workloads of unmarried and married rural young women; the latter living in matrilocal or patrilocal households. Despite evidence that access to leisure time contributes to women’s well-being, a large gap remains regarding young women’s leisure activities in rural India. This project is attempting to fill that gap by analyzing the gendered geographies of domestic labor and leisure. It is also making a methodological contribution by recording the work and leisure conditions of populations with low literacy through audio diaries.

Vasanthy Narayanaswami

Dr. Vasanthy Narayanaswami is a professor of biochemistry in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at California State University Long Beach (CSULB). She obtained her PhD in chemistry (biochemistry) from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, did a postdoctoral training as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the University of Dusseldorf in Germany, and a research associateship at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her research work involves investigating the role of apolipoprotein E (apoE), the cholesterol transport protein, in relation to cardiovascular ailment and Alzheimer’s disease (AD), two major global biomedical issues. She employs a combination of biochemical, molecular, and cell biological, as well as spectroscopic approaches to examine the role that dysfunctional high-density lipoprotein (HDL) (aka “the good cholesterol”) plays in cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. She also studies the role of oxidative stress on HDL biology and its function in the amyloidogenesis process in AD brains at the molecular and cellular levels. Besides, her research group evaluates the use of HDL nanodiscs as drug-delivery and targeting vehicles.

Dr. Narayanaswami has over 75 publications in peer-reviewed journals, several with students as co-authors. In 2017, she received the title of Fellow of the American Heart Association (FAHA) from the American Heart Association (AHA) for her meritorious contributions and commitment to AHA’s mission. She has received several awards and honors in recognition of her research and scholarly activities. Noteworthy among these are the 2020 Faculty Research Award from the California State University Program for Education and Research in Biotechnology and the 2020 CSULB Outstanding Professor Award.

Dr. Narayanaswami is an ardent advocate of equity and diversity in biomedical research and directs several federally funded programs that are designed to enhance equity, diversity, and inclusion in research.

In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Narayanaswami is addressing the etiology of AD. She is engaged in investigating the physiochemical aspects of amyloid plaque formation, a hallmark feature of AD, using the sophisticated mass spectrometry and imaging tools at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Hyderabad in India. This project has significance also because it calls for combining forces and initiating collaborations between two major educational and research organizations.

Preetha Mani

Dr. Preetha Mani received her BA from Tufts University and her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Mani is associate professor of South Asian literatures in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) and core faculty member in the program in comparative literature at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method (Northwestern University Press and Permanent Black, 2022). Her research expertise lies in modern Hindi, Tamil, and Indian literatures, and she has published widely on issues of translation, women’s writing, and feminism in India; literary realism and modernism; postcolonial studies; and world literature. She has also published translations of Hindi and Tamil literature, autobiography, and criticism into English. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, American Institute of Indian Studies, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Fulbright.

Dr. Mani’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining Tamil new poetry, a form of modernist free verse that became popular in 1950s’ magazines and set a benchmark against which later poets defined their work. By the 1980s, new poetry writing had democratized the poetic form. Exploring new poetry’s development in print culture, she is proposing that this genre was a primary avenue for writers to cross ideological boundaries and to draw inspiration from each other and from writers in other Indian and world languages. Dr. Mani’s research is attempting to demonstrate that rather than being a linguistic outlier to the national canon, Tamil new poetry was a means for generating ideas for a postcolonial pan-Indian literature built on the poetic form.

Pamela Lothspeich

Dr. Pamela Lothspeich is associate professor of South Asian studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she has been teaching since 2008. She is a literary scholar and cultural historian whose work intersects with epic studies, performance studies, gender studies, and postcolonial studies. She has published extensively on modern iterations of Indian epics, particularly as they appear in Hindi literature, theatre, and film. Her previous research project was on the Radheshyam Ramayan and the theatre of Ramlila. Her books include Epic Nation: Reimagining the Mahabharata in the Age of Empire (OUP, 2009) and the co-edited volume, Mimetic Desires: Impersonation and Guising across South Asia (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022). She has also guest-edited the special issue, “The Field of Ramlila”, in the Asian Theatre Journal (Spring 2020).

Formerly, she taught at Michigan State University (2004–08) and Chicago University (2003– 04). She holds a PhD in South Asian studies and comparative literature from Columbia University (2003) and an MA in Asian languages and literature from the University of Washington (1996).

Dr. Lothspeich’s research project is on Raslila, an Indian performance genre spanning theatre, dance, music, and ritual, which enacts stories about the Hindu god Krishna and the goddess Radha. Many stories in the tradition emphasize Krishna’s youthful antics and loving interactions with his devotees. Raslila is related to other forms of devotional theatre, especially the Ramlila centered on the Hindu god Ram. This project aims to provide fresh insights into Raslila in all its material social, political, and aesthetic contexts, and also into its intertwined history with Ramlila.

Gopal Krishnan

Prof. Gopal Krishnan is a trustee professor of accountancy and the coordinator of the PhD program in accounting at Bentley University. Before joining Bentley, he was the chair of the Accounting Department at Kogod School of Business, American University, Washington, D.C. He has also taught at Lehigh University and George Mason University. He is a chartered accountant, certified public accountant, and a certified management accountant. Professor Krishnan is cited in the Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers for his teaching excellence. His research addresses issues concerning auditor independence and audit quality, corporate governance and earnings management. He has published 80 articles in accounting and finance journals, including Accounting, Organizations and Society, Contemporary Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, Review of Accounting Studies, Journal of Banking & Finance, Journal of the American Taxation Association, Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory, Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, Accounting Horizons, Journal of Management Accounting Research, and Journal of Business Ethics. His work has been featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Accounting Today, CNBC.com, Reuters, CFOWorld, and CFO.com. His co-authored article on a synthesis of audit-quality literature was awarded the 2016 Best Paper Award by the Auditing Section of the American Accounting Association. He was a senior editor of Accounting Horizons and holds a PhD from the University of North Texas.

Business groups (BGs) are dominant forms of industrial organization in India. For example, BG-affiliated firms account for 67 per cent of the total Bombay Stock Exchange market capitalization. However, despite the importance of BGs in India, there is a paucity of empirical research on the quality of audits of firms affiliated with BGs. Prof. Krishnan’s Fulbright-Nehru project is conducting an empirical study of the audit quality of Indian firms which are affiliated with BGs. Specifically, the study is examining whether there is a difference in audit quality between Indian firms affiliated with BGs and those that are unaffiliated (standalone firms).

David Ghertner

Prof. David Ghertner received his BA from Colby College and MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University where he previously served as the director of the South Asian Studies Program. He is the author of Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life (Duke University Press, 2020) and Land Fictions: The Commodification of Land in City and Country (Cornell University Press, 2021). His research expertise lies in urban geography, and he has published widely on informal housing, property rights, urban aesthetics, and environmental governance. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

A series of digital property reform programs are currently spreading across rural India, utilizing drone mapping and digital technologies to map, title, and enclose landholdings. Digitized property rights are deemed essential to fighting poverty and fostering rural development, but also face technical and political challenges that vary by region and land tenure. The translation of customary rights, bordering of land, and construction of data infrastructure depend upon complex bureaucratic work. Through ethnographic research involving engineers and bureaucrats who are implementing the reforms in Goa and Delhi NCR and by interacting with residents impacted by these reforms, Prof. David Ghertner’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring how digital property is reconstituting landownership in India.

Colette Copeland

Ms. Colette Copeland’s artistic and pedagogical practice is critically engaged with a symbiotic, diverse range of aesthetic and cultural values which emphasize interdisciplinary and collaborative work. As an established visual artist, her work has been featured in 28 solo exhibitions and 155 group exhibitions/festivals spanning 35 countries over the past 30 years. Her work as a visual artist and cultural critic/writer examines issues surrounding gender, identity, death, and contemporary culture. She sources personal narratives, historical texts, and popular media, utilizing video, photography, printmaking, performance, dance, text, audio, sculptural installation, and community activism to question societal roles, gendered violence, and the pervasive influence of media and technology on communal enculturation. She is interested in artists, including the conceptual kind, whose work deviates from traditional disciplines and training and who use non-traditional materials and processes in their work, such as in sculptural installation, performance, video, relational aesthetics, and social practice/collaborative activism.

Ms. Copeland received her BFA from Pratt Institute in New York and her MFA from Syracuse University. She has taught at six institutions over the past 20 years, each with diverse, global student populations. At the University of Pennsylvania, she developed and taught a new interdisciplinary visual studies major that incorporated visual arts, critical theory, humanities, and social sciences. Currently at the University of Texas at Dallas, she teaches an interdisciplinary “Fluxus-inspired” contemporary practices studio course, digital photography, and performance art.

Since 2001, Ms. Copeland has been writing for a variety of art publications and institutions like The Photo Review, Fotophile, Afterimage, Exposure, Ceramics: Art and Perception, Arteidolia, Glasstire, and Eutopia. She has 116 published articles to her credit. Most recently, she published two catalog essays – “Avery, A Family Legacy” and “Re-emergence: Women AbEx and Color Field Artists”. She is a long-time member of AICA-International Association of Art Critics.

Ms. Copeland’s Fulbright-Nehru project is focusing on qualitative research about underrepresented female visual artists from India, whose work explores themes of boundaries – physical, emotional, real, imagined, geographical, virtual, convergent, divergent, and transformative – using conceptual and contemporary multimedia art practices.

Meenakshi Chandra Sekar

Dr. M. Chandra Sekar obtained his BPharm and MPharm from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India. Then he earned a PhD at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and completed his postdoctoral work from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Following this, Dr. Sekar was a researcher at the University of Alabama in Birmingham where he made significant contributions to the area of phosphoinositide signaling.

Dr. Sekar then served as a pharmacist at the University of Cincinnati Hospital in Ohio for seven years before joining the University of Findlay as an associate professor in pharmaceutical sciences in 2007. He was promoted to full professor with tenure in 2013 and now also serves as the International Ambassador for Pharmacy Education for the University of Findlay. Earlier, in 2010, he started a study abroad program that enabled student and faculty exchanges between the University of Findlay and pharmacy colleges in India. Over the past decade, 40 students from each country have availed of this opportunity.

Dr. Sekar’s commitment to improving pharmacy practices in India has been recognized by the Indian Pharmacist Association – by bestowing him with the M.L. Khorana Memorial Award in 2018 and electing him as a fellow of the association in 2019. Dr. Sekar’s other honors include: being a fellow of the American Pharmacists Association; winning the B.M. Mittal Memorial Award from his alma mater, BITS; and winning the David L. Allen award for holistic teaching.

In his Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Sekar is studying the impact of pharmacist involvement in improving patient outcomes for hypertension and diabetes.

Manish Chalana

Dr. Manish Chalana, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington, with adjunct appointments in Architecture and Landscape Architecture in the College of Built Environments. He is also an affiliate of the South Asia Center in the Jackson School of International Studies (JSIS). His work engages with urban planning through the lenses of historic preservation, international planning and development, and equity and social justice. He is also the director of the Graduate Certificate in Historic Preservation and co-directs the Center for Preservation and Adaptive Reuse (CPAR) which strives to connect the academia to the practice of historic preservation. Additionally, he is the membership chair of the National Council for Preservation Education (NCPE). Dr. Chalana’s scholarly contributions have been substantial, including two co-edited volumes. The first, titled Messy Urbanism: Understanding the “Other” Cities of Asia (with Jeffrey Hou, Hong Kong University Press, 2016), goes beyond the mainstream discourse in exploring the complexities of urbanism in Asian cities. The second volume, Heritage Conservation in Postcolonial India: Approaches and Challenges (with Ashima Krishna, Routledge, 2021), critically examines heritage conservation in the context of India’s postcolonial society. Additionally, he has published on topics of urban planning and historic preservation in a variety of academic journals, including the Journal of Architectural Education, the Journal of Heritage Stewardship, Planning Perspectives, Journal of Planning History, and Journal of the American Planning Association.

Dr. Chalana’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the state of historic preservation, or “heritage conservation”, in India, focusing on its inclusivity and equity aspects. The project is primarily examining the representation of sites associated with underrepresented communities in the historical record and is assessing their management and interpretation on the ground. Additionally, the project is investigating the types of histories and memories that may have been lost for sites where physical evidence no longer exists. The study’s emphasis is on Dalits, non-elite Muslims, Sikhs, women, and non-binary groups.

Gil Ben-Herut

Dr. Gil Ben-Herut is an associate professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. He holds a PhD in religious studies from Emory University and a BA and MA from Tel Aviv University in Israel. His research interests include premodern religious literature in the Kannada language, South Asian bhakti (devotional) traditions, translation in South Asia, and programming in digital humanities.

His book, Śiva’s Saints: The Origins of Devotion in Kannada according to Harihara’s Ragaḷegaḷu (Oxford University Press, 2018), is the first study in English of the earliest Śaiva hagiographies in the Kannada-speaking region, and it argues for a reconsideration of the development of devotionalism as associated today with the Vīraśaivas. The book received the Best First Book Award for 2019 from the Southeastern Medieval Association and the 2020 Best Book Award from the Southeastern Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. Dr. Ben-Herut also received the Faculty Outstanding Research Achievement Award from the University of South Florida for the year 2020.

Dr. Ben-Herut recently completed co-translating selections from the Ragaḷe hagiographical collection for a book-length publication (under review). This project is funded by the American Academy of Religion’s Collaborative International Research Grant. His publications include a co-translation of a twelfth-century Kannada treatise about poetics, encyclopedic entries, a co-edited volume, book chapters, and peer-reviewed articles. Dr. Ben-Herut is the co-founder of the Regional Bhakti Scholars Network, a platform for facilitating scholarly conversations about South Asian devotional traditions.

Utilizing his extensive experience in computer programming, Dr. Ben-Herut also leads several digital humanities projects, including digital ROSES and BHAVA. He is a member of the Digital India Learning Committee of the American Institute of Indian Studies and an active collaborator in digital projects about South Asian texts and languages involving open-source and open-access environments.

The textual “biography” of the vachana corpus – an expanding collection of devotional and lyrical poetry in Kannada from the twelfth century – spans over several key moments in the history of South India, starting with an innovative devotional practice of personal oral proclamations and then developing into a written canon that served as the fulcrum for a new religious sect, until finally becoming a cultural tool for biting social critique in the modern period. Dr. Ben-Herut’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining how, nine centuries after their appearance, the vachanas became the most cherished literature in Kannada and an exemplar of sorts for spiritual poetry around the world.