Anmol Ghavri is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a 2023-2024 US Fulbright-Nehru Scholar affiliated with the Centre for Historical Studies at JNU. He focuses on the history of modern South Asia as well as global histories of capitalism, political economy, and economic life. He is especially interested in the history of India’s modern market economy and society. At Michigan he has been an instructor in courses covering all periods of South Asian history. His Fulbright and doctoral research is on the history of vernacular capitalism and enterprise of agrarian communities in north India adapting to the uneven economic transformations of the twentieth century. It seeks to pluralize our understanding of the lineage of capitalism and the institutions, contradictions, and contestations characteristic of modern India’s economy. He received his BA in History from Dartmouth College with High Honors in 2018 and master’s degrees from Columbia University and the London School of Economics in 2020.
Archives: Meet Our USA Fulbrighters
Akshali Gandhi
Akshali Gandhi is a senior transportation planner for King County Metro in Seattle, Washington. In this capacity, she has worked on bus-stop improvements, capital planning, parking policy, mobility hubs, and bicycle/pedestrian paths across the Puget Sound region. Earlier, Akshali was a consultant for Nelson\Nygaard’s Washington, D.C. office and a transportation planner for the City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In total, she has seven years of professional work experience in the transportation planning field.
Akshali holds a bachelor’s degree in community and regional planning from Iowa State University and a master’s degree in city and regional planning from Cornell University. She is Indian American and has published research on economic development challenges along commercial corridors in immigrant neighborhoods, with a focus on Devon Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. Akshali is passionate about pedestrian safety, street design, and urban mobility for vulnerable users.
Traffic fatalities are a leading cause of death among young people in India. As a transportation professional, Gandhi is interested in researching the role street design and public space interventions play in road safety for infants, children, and caregivers. A new program in Pune retrofits urban streets into pedestrian zones for children to walk, bike, and play. For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Akshali is conducting a public life study of selected road safety projects to monitor how children and caregivers use such street interventions. Working with the Institute for Transportation Development and Policy India (ITDP India), she is compiling her findings into a case study and toolkit of best practices to share with planners and policymakers.
Baldeep Dhaliwal
Baldeep Dhaliwal is currently pursuing her PhD in international health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH). She received her MSPH in health policy and management from JHSPH and her BS in cognitive science-neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego.
After receiving her MSPH, Baldeep pursued a career in healthcare consulting in Washington, D.C. As a healthcare consultant, she focused on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act at the state health exchange level. Baldeep then went on to pursue a research career at the International Vaccine Access Center (IVAC) where she focused on utilizing qualitative research skills and community-based participatory research methods to better understand vaccine acceptance, and lead vaccine advocacy efforts at the community, institution, and policy levels. Her work also dealt with understanding multi-level perceptions that impact vaccine-seeking behavior while simultaneously supporting policy change to improve vaccine coverage.
Baldeep has nine peer-reviewed articles to her credit and has written several academic commentaries and op-eds for journals and health blogs. As a doctoral researcher, she is focusing extensively on vaccine advocacy; she is also interested in understanding health delivery in marginalized urban populations – how urban populations access care and the role that frontline health workers in low- and middle-income countries play or do not play in delivering primary care.
The Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) program was established in India in 2005 to connect rural populations to health services. To further strengthen health delivery, the ASHA program was implemented in urban communities in 2014. The urban ASHA program’s impacts on communities are unclear, as there is a significant literature gap. Baldeep’s Fulbright-Nehru project is using qualitative research methods to facilitate a rich understanding of urban ASHA workers. She feels that as India is presently strengthening its health delivery in urban areas, particularly through the development of comprehensive urban primary health centers, it is essential to have a better grasp on the urban ASHA program.
Brock DeMark
Brock DeMark is a PhD student at Indiana University (IU), Bloomington, studying modern Indian history, British colonial/imperial history, and urban development. Before his doctoral coursework, Brock lived in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he completed his bachelor’s degree in history and English literature at the University of Arkansas in 2019. At IU, Brock has served as the leader of its History Department’s Graduate Student Association. He organized a national conference for history graduate students in Bloomington in 2022. Brock is also active in IU’s Dhar India Studies Program, practicing his Hindi at weekly conversation table meetings, attending Hindi and Urdu movie events, and composing poems in Hindi. Besides, Brock spent the summer of 2022 in Jaipur, India, studying Hindi under the Critical Language Scholarship Program.
Brock’s dissertation research is an urban history project that examines the “fabrication” of Kanpur, India – a global industrial hub – in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The word “fabrication” denotes both “invention” and a “process of constructing, fashioning, and manufacture”. Attentive to the ways in which Kanpur was “fabricated” in both senses of the word – how it was invented as a place that people would be interested in going to find work or investing money, as well as the processes and relationships that led to the construction of the city’s material infrastructure – Brock’s project seeks to make a unique contribution to the scholarly understandings of habitability and community-formation during the colonial period. Brock’s dissertation is drawing on written sources in English and Hindi located in the libraries and archives of Kanpur, Lucknow, Delhi, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
When he is not researching, writing, or reading about Indian history, Brock enjoys hiking, playing basketball, reading popular astronomy articles, and drinking lassi with his partner, Savannah.
Brock’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining the growth and development of Kanpur from 1870 to 1930. The primary goal is to understand how uneven relationships of power between European industrialists, municipal officials, and Indian residents shaped the design of the city. A relatively small commercial mart and military depot that expanded rapidly during the first few decades of the Crown rule, Kanpur grew up alongside the colonial state itself. As such, Kanpur offers a unique insight into the discrepancies between what the colonial state claimed about its development projects versus their impact on the everyday life of Indian residents.
Devin Creed
Devin Creed is a PhD candidate in South Asian history at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He has completed field exams in modern South Asian history, global British empire, food history, and science and empire. Devin’s dissertation examines the changes in the practices and ideologies of “giving for eating” in the context of famines in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asia. He works with sources in Bangla, Hindi, Urdu, and English. At Duke, Devin has been a Kenan Graduate Fellow, a Capper Fellow in intellectual history, and a fellow at the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge. He has made public presentations on: the erotica of the pickle in South Asian literature and history; traces of Portuguese cuisine in modern West Bengal; the political theory of B.R. Ambedkar; and the history of Catholic missions in Meghalaya. His research interests include metabolic and ecological histories, food and fermentation, and capitalism and imperialism.
He has previously received grants to conduct research in Philadelphia (on the Knights of Labor), London (on British famine policy), Northern Ireland (on martyrdom in the Irish Republican Army), and India (on famine relief). He received his MA in modern European history from Villanova University (Pennsylvania) and his BA in economics and English literature from Hillsdale College (Michigan).
Devin is an avid cook and food experimenter who spends a good deal of his time pickling, fermenting, baking, and cooking. He enjoys reading science fiction, watching films, backpacking, hiking, singing, and learning languages.
Devastating famines punctuated British colonial rule in India, a period that saw famines in Bengal in 1770 and 1943 which killed over 10 million people. Devin’s Fulbright-Nehru project is arguing that the Indian responses to states of endemic malnutrition and famine played a significant role in creating the postcolonial regimes of food charity – what he calls “giving for eating” – in India today. Devin’s research is being driven by the following question: how did inherited understandings and practices of gifting food change in the face of widespread famine, new ideas of Western humanitarianism, and the birth of modern nutrition science?
Rhea Chandran
Rhea Chandran graduated from Haverford College with a BA in history in 2023. She was born and raised in Geneva, Illinois, by immigrant parents from India. She attended Phillips Academy Andover where she discovered her passion for advocacy and humanities research. At Haverford, she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow where she was supported by the Mellon Foundation to conduct independent research and prepare for graduate studies. She also served as the co-chair of the Honor Council; as a student representative on a faculty committee on student academic standing; and as a co-organizer of the first-year orientation program. She has worked for the House Committee on Homeland Security; for the Office of Congresswoman Lauren Underwood; for BallotReady; and for the American Business Immigration Coalition.
Rhea’s Fulbright-Nehru project is studying the historical and sociological impacts on women who exit commercial sex work in India. She is conducting archive-based historical analysis to trace the impacts of modern India’s laws governing prostitution. Her historical research is informing her sociological study which focuses on documenting casework and collecting interview data from these women to discern the best pathways for rehabilitation. Rhea’s research is seeking to answer integral questions related to how the history of criminalization of prostitution affects sex workers today.
Ava Boussy
Ava Boussy is a recent graduate of Washington and Lee University with a double major in biology and art history. She first began working with 3D modeling through Florence As It Was, a professor’s project seeking to document the churches in Florence, Italy, as a way to present and preserve spaces. While Ava learnt technical skills through this process, she also began examining ways in which new digital technology could be used to promote accessibility in academia and the arts. She then joined Professor Melissa Kerin on a research trip to Ladakh. There, she not only workshopped digital modeling in an area vastly different from Florence but also gained a better understanding of working with local populations and how they promote and protect their cultural heritage.
Ava was a member of Washington and Lee’s women’s soccer team and enjoys hiking in the Blue Ridge and reading.
Ava’s Fulbright-Nehru project is promoting awareness and accessibility of Buddhist art, specifically Ladakhi Buddhist art, by creating digital models of Buddhist shrines and temples in Ladakh. The models are being created using a combination of photographs and laser scans to create accurate representations of the sites and works, and can be viewed on most digital devices. These will serve as references for future researchers and curious learners, especially given the fact that many sites are changing due to natural degradation and planned renovation and restorations.
Alexandra Blitzer
Alexandra Blitzer is a native of Westport, Connecticut, and a recent graduate from Brown University. She holds a BA in history and early modern world. She is passionate about gender policy, social change, legal studies, human rights, the performing arts, political journalism, and public service.
Prior to her Fulbright grant, Alexandra worked for the White House Gender Policy Council as an intern. She has also worked for Deloitte Consulting, Ernst & Young Climate Change and Sustainability Services, TIME’S UP Now, and the Biden–Harris campaign. Besides, she was the editor-in-chief of the Brown Political Review. She has significant experience living abroad, having spent time in Israel and Italy.
Alexandra has written extensively for the Brown Political Review on varied topics like reproductive rights, social justice, sustainability, and voting. She also wrote an undergraduate thesis, which was awarded honors, titled “Changing the Law, Changing a Community: Lamphere v. Brown University and The Opportunities and Limitations of Legal Remedies for Driving Social Change in the Workplace”. Her thesis was also awarded the Gaspee Chapter Daughters of the American Revolution Award. She is also a Birthright Excel Global Fellow (2021).
Outside of her work, Alexandra enjoys the performing arts, screenwriting, reading, spending time with friends and family, skiing, hiking, and crafting. Following her Fulbright-Nehru grant, she hopes to go to law school and continue her advocacy for women and girls as a policymaker in U.S. and international contexts.
Alexandra’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is bringing together the fields of labor, gender, law, and policy. Her research is focusing on the implementation and enforcement of India’s 2013 law titled “The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, or POSH Act. She is analyzing the benefits India’s economy would realize with the effective enforcement of this law. This project is significant because workplace sexual harassment is prevalent in India and the effective enforcement of the POSH Act would have major implications for the safety and well-being of women and girls, as well as for India’s economy as a whole.
Caroline Bennet
Caroline Bennet is a scholar from Denver, Colorado. She recently graduated from Yale University with simultaneously awarded bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history. In her undergraduate degree, her focus lay on international security studies, diplomatic history, and urban history. She spent her graduate degree studying the history of the American Southwest. Caroline wrote her undergraduate thesis and her graduate dissertation on the history of Denver’s urban growth.
Caroline was a participant in Yale’s highly selective Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, which is aimed at addressing the large-scale and long-term strategic challenges of statecraft, politics, and social change. Through this program, she received a fellowship to research private-sector strategies for combating poverty, gender inequality, and environmental destruction in New Delhi.
At Yale, Caroline served as the director of Civic Education in Every Vote Counts, a student-led organization committed to making voting accessible to young people. She also worked for Gary Community Ventures, a Denver enterprise that mobilizes policy, philanthropy, and venture capital to address inequity and improve the lives of Colorado kids and families. While there, she helped design a high-dosage tutoring program to address COVID-interrupted learning among low-income students. She has also contributed articles to Refinery29 and the New Hampshire Union Leader, and has presented her research at various conferences and events.
Caroline’s favorite pastimes are running, reading, and watching terrible television with her little sisters. In the winter, she spends every moment she can shredding on the ski slopes.
Community-ownership business models designate various community stakeholders (producers, suppliers, employees, the environment) as shareholders. In theory, this model ensures that an enterprise’s missions will align with its stakeholders’ interests: cultural preservation; healthcare; livable wages; and environmental protection. However, practical applications of this model require investment in the business. Garnering the necessary buy-in is difficult, especially at large scales. Caroline’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining the factors that reinforce communities’ trust in businesses which claim to represent their interests. She believes that understanding the aspects of the community-ownership model that promotes trust could reveal crucial information about how it can generate social impact.
Lily Bello
Lily Bello is a recent graduate from CUNY’s Brooklyn College where she received a BA in anthropology with a minor in LGBT studies. Her studies focused on qualitative ethnographic research methodologies as well as on transgender cultures and human rights law. She has research experience – funded via internships, academic programs, and research awards – studying activist movements and community landownership. Besides her academic pursuits, Lily has both personal and professional experience in transgender rights activism, including by working with the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, a firm focused on human rights law as it applies to transgender communities. Following her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Lily will be pursuing PhD programs in anthropology to study the relationship between transgender human rights law and the decolonial conceptions of gender-variant identity.
Lily’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the emerging relationship between contemporary personal law and traditional modes of communal housing among hijra and other gender-variant communities. This ethnographic study is taking place in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru in order to account for local cultural differences in the housing practices of these communities. The research is addressing the relationship between legal structures and the social organization of gender-variant communities, and thus contributing to a broader discourse on the application of human rights law to such communities within their local cultural contexts.