Archives: Meet Our USA Fulbrighters

Persis Naumann

Ms. Persis Naumann is a PhD Candidate and Adjunct Professor at the Center for Global Health Ethics, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, where she also holds a master’s degree in Healthcare Ethics. Her educational background includes a bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from Sathyabama University, Chennai, India. Prior to moving to the U.S., Ms. Naumann taught IGCSE biology at Ghiyasuddin International School in the Maldives.

She is also the founder of Kelir Books LLC in Pittsburgh that produces bilingual Tamil language and cultural resources that represent all types of Tamil families including Tamils living around the globe, multicultural families, and language learners.

As a PhD student her research directly impacts Tamil women and the wider South Asian community. As a professor of ethics, she focuses on the promotion of cultural understanding and ethical decision making in cross-cultural care. In her entrepreneurial endeavor rooted in social responsibility, she equips and empowers parents and families through the complexities of socio-cultural identity in today’s world and advocates for ethical approaches in storytelling, representation, and business practice.

Ms. Naumann has extensive experience in bioethics empirical research including the qualitative research project, “Barriers to involvement in healthcare decision making in advanced cancer care in minority populations”, which was published in the Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics Journal. She has also presented bioethics papers at major regional, national, and international ethics conferences and won several regional and national scholarships.

She worked with the Director of the American Nurse Association (ANA) Center for Ethics and Human Rights on nursing ethics policies, contributing towards ANA’s position statements and publications on gender and culture.

She has been a member of the Advisory Committee at Jeevaratchanai Social Service Organization Chennai, India, for over 10 years and currently provides them with quality and ethics consultation. By volunteering in person at the Jeevaratchanai children’s home and collaborating with the host institution during the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship she will spend time with the girls living there and students at the university, sharing America’s diverse culture and history through music, dance, sports, and food, celebrating the differences, and embracing the similarities in the cultures of America and India, as well as sharing her own travel and migration experience as a Chennai-born girl living in Pittsburgh. As a Global Health Ethicist with interdisciplinary experience, specialized in healthcare ethics research, teaching, practice, and policy, Ms. Naumann continues to contribute to the field of healthcare ethics, particularly at the intersections of class, culture, and gender.

Social stigma associated with involuntary childlessness persists in society – costing people their mental health, their relationships, their careers, and even their lives. Since much of the healthcare and ethics research, discourse, and processes stem from the Global North, they can lack the nuances and complexities that come with specific cultural understanding. This research aims to develop a robust, comprehensive, and culturally relevant ethical framework for sexual and reproductive healthcare by studying the impact of social stigma on healthcare decision making among women with involuntary childlessness in Tamil Nadu.

Through ongoing extensive research, Ms. Naumann is creating frameworks in the intersectional field of ethics, culture, and stigma in relation to healthcare access and decision making; lecturing in the field of healthcare education, raising the next generation of ethical thinkers and doers; and creating a network of culturally competent ethics trainers who will support organizations to address bias, stigma, and discrimination as a healthcare intervention.

Abhi Nathan

Ms. Abhi Nathan, originally from Marietta, Georgia, is a graduate of Vanderbilt University, where she earned a BA in Political Science and Medicine, Health & Society. In the summer of 2019, Ms. Nathan completed a congressional internship through the International Leadership Foundation where she focused on health and immigration policy. Her senior honors thesis built on these experiences, examining public policy during the COVID-19 pandemic in six cities across the United States to determine how local, state, and federal policy intersected to affect healthcare outcomes for immigrant populations.

On campus, she served as the President of Vanderbilt’s South Asian Cultural Exchange and chaired the annual Diwali Showcase, one of the largest cultural showcases on Vanderbilt’s campus celebrating the diversity and culture of South Asia. She also led voter registration and civic engagement efforts as a campus ambassador for the non-profit organization Asian Pacific Islander American Vote and the captain of Vandy Taal, a competitive South Asian fusion a Capella team. Following her graduation from Vanderbilt University, Ms. Nathan worked as a consulting analyst at Avascent, a boutique management consulting firm serving government-driven industries. She will be matriculating to Harvard Law School after the completion of her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship.

Ms. Nathan is conducting a research project which investigates the effectiveness of different types of local government bodies in Tamil Nadu. This is being accomplished through a series of case studies of various localities which represent the different types of local governments present in Tamil Nadu along a scale of urbanization (i.e., a gram panchayat, a town panchayat, a municipality, etc.). Through Fulbright-Nehru project, Ms. Nathan hopes to understand how differences in urbanization and location, among other factors, affect the administrative efficiency and civic engagement rates of these different localities. She is conducting this research under the guidance of the Peninsula Foundation (TPF), a Tamil Nadu-based non-profit think tank that works to reinforce India’s strength as an independent, sovereign nation-state through research on key policy issues.

Addie McKnight

As an aspiring museum professional, Ms. Addie McKnight completed a Bachelor in Art History (2014) and an Master in Folklore & Ethnomusicology (2020) at Indiana University-Bloomington with interests in material culture and Tibetan Studies. Through a passion for honoring arts and cultures from around the world, Ms. McKnight has dedicated herself to working in museum spaces with a focus on critical engagement with ethnographic collections and institutional legacies. From a young age, Ms. McKnight felt a personal connection to both the aesthetic and philosophical sensibilities of Tibetan Buddhism. Her academic and professional goals are centered on the representation of Tibetan culture within United States museums. She has studied Tibetan language for the past five years through institutions across three different countries: Indiana University and the American Institute of Indian Studies in the United States, Rangjung Yeshe in Nepal, and the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamshala, India. Ms. McKnight’s experience in museums include research assistantships at Indiana University’s Mathers Museum of World Cultures, an internship at the Himalayan-focused Rubin Museum of Art in New York City, and participation in the Smithsonian Institution’s 2019 Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology (SIMA). Taken together, these experiences have informed her approach to conducting research, communicating with culture-bearers, and facilitating educational experiences within representational spaces.

Through her Fulbright-Nehru research, Ms. McKnight aims to understand how Tibetan artists and arts administrators in Dharamshala, India, present and promote cohesive visions of Tibetan culture and tradition to both Tibetan and other audiences. By conducting interviews, participant observation, and documenting organizational practices at the Norbulingka Institute, Ms. McKnight aims to create a portfolio of educational and curatorial materials to bring to future work in US museums. These materials will help US museums represent their Tibetan collections in ways that address the history, politics, and contemporary practices of Tibetan people.

Calvin McCormack

Mr. Calvin McCormack is a musician, audio engineer, and computer programmer from Baltimore, MD. He completed his undergraduate degree in Jazz Studies from the University of Michigan, where he focused on the intersection of jazz improvisation and non-western musical idioms. During this time, he spent two months in Mysuru studying the Saraswathi Veena. He is also a recent graduate of Berklee College of Music, where he received his master’s degree in Music Production, Technology, and Innovation, with an emphasis on the use of bio-sensors and accessible interfaces in musical instrument design. As part of his thesis at Berklee, Mr. McCormack developed software that uses electroencephalogram (EEG) brainwave signals to control digital music generation and sound design. Since 2018, Mr. McCormack has been working with CED Society, a Dehradun-based non-profit dedicated to supporting women in the Himalayan border region. Together with CED Society, Mr. McCormack has helped launch the Sound of Soul Recording Studio and Music Institute, a nonprofit music education center and recording studio designed to empower disadvantaged and disabled women through music education, production skills, and creative expression. Mr. McCormack has also worked as an active musician, music instructor, author of music teaching materials, assistant at a digital fabrication lab, and spent two years as an assistant engineer at Radio Active Productions recording studio in Austin, TX.

Traditional musical instruments have been developed and refined over centuries, but digital instruments are a relatively new technology with great potential for innovation. Mr. McCormack’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to design, develop, and test digital musical instruments that have been created specifically for people with disabilities in remote areas of northern India. The project is using bio-sensors, low-cost computers, and digital fabrication tools to create accessible musical instruments and is studying their efficacy in rural areas, resulting in an enhanced understanding of the design and production of affordable and accessible creative tools.

Aleksandra Matic

Ms. Aleksandra Matic holds a BA in Art History from Lake Forest College and an MA in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, focusing on modern and contemporary art from South Asia, Gender Studies, and Cold War Constellations. During an 18-year tenure at the Art Institute of Chicago, her roles included growing and revitalizing the member and donor travel programs and overseeing the museum’s legacy society as the Associate Director of Donor Travel and the Director of the Buckingham Society. In 2019, she curated an exhibition at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago titled Coming into Being- a conversation between nine visual artists which explored questions of identity and the ‘othered’ body using post-colonial theory.

She serves on the Executive Advisory Council, Emeritus Board, for the Educational Travel Consortium. Ms. Matic volunteers for various culture, health, and community-focused organizations, including the Artists of Nathdwara, Core of Culture, and Center on Halsted. She is an active member of The Arts Club of Chicago and the International Museum of Surgical Science. Ms. Matic enjoys travelling, reading, and volunteering in her free time.

This Fulbright-Nehru project in India is a collaboration with a multigenerational collective of pichvai artists in the temple town of Nathdwara. Pichvai are decorative textiles utilized by a Hindu devotional community called the Pushtimarg in their veneration of Lord Krishna. The focus of Ms. Matic ’s proposal involves working with a local filmmaker to produce a documentary based on the lives of these pichvai artists, the history of their painting, and Nathdwara. This documentary will communicate a crucial narrative and create dialogue within a global community to provide the platform needed for future pichvai artists to create and thrive for generations.

Janani Mandayam Comar

Ms. Janani Comar is a PhD student at the University of Toronto in the Department of Religion. Her research is at the intersection of religion, caste, and performance. She is particularly interested in the way mythological narratives engage in ethical discourses. Her dissertation looks at hagiographies of mythic figures in colonial South India, and she traces the circulation of their narratives through print and performance. At University of Toronto, she holds the Connaught International Doctoral Scholarship and was a recipient of the MITACS Research Training Award in 2020. She has presented her research at several conferences, including the annual South Asia Conference held at University of Wisconsin Madison.

For the Fulbright-Nehru project, Ms. Comar aims to revisit the history of modern Hinduism to explore how religion and ethics are intimately linked to social status in the colonial period. Working with scholars at the French Institute of Pondicherry, she is focusing on the writings of subaltern Tamil-speaking communities and explore how these groups participated in lively ethical debates through performance. She is also accessing a wide range of archival sources, including from contemporary performers, to trace how narratives about virtuous figures circulated in rural and urban areas. Her findings will be an integral part of her doctoral dissertation on Tamil literature and performance.

Abiola Makinde

Ms. Abiola Makinde is a Nigerian-American woman from Lagos and South Florida. As a recent graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Industrial Design, she completed a senior thesis centered around Sickle Cell and Pain Management. As an Emergency Design Council Fellow she collaborated with designers from the IDC School of Design and the National Institute of Design in researching and designing solutions to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the mental health of children in India. Ms. Makinde has also served as a Design Educator for high school students in an after-school program, which focused on the fundamentals and importance of collaborating in the design thinking process.

Ms. Makinde’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining research design solutions to extend culturally relevant and adaptable hospital and home tools and services for Indian children with Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) and their caretakers past the hospital and into their homes before and after visits. With the support of Prof. Ravi Poovaiah of The Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and Dr. Yazdi Italia of the Shirin and Jamshed Guzder Regional Blood Centre, her intention is to understand the patient’s journey and challenge points to find ways, through the lens of design, to positively affect the overall experience of the patient and the caregiver.

Christopher LaMountain

Mr. Christopher LaMountain is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he pursued a double major in Religious Studies and Music Performance Studies. After being awarded an Undergraduate Research Grant from Northwestern in 2018, Mr. LaMountain completed a multi-media research project comparing gynecological texts of Mediterranean Antiquity with Marian narratives of the New Testament Apocrypha. In the latter portion of his collegiate career, Mr. LaMountain conducted research on devotional music at seven of the eight continental Baha’i Houses of Worship as the 2019 Northwestern Circumnavigator grantee. Having sung in choirs and as a classically trained tenor soloist, Mr. LaMountain also sung with the musicians of Baha’i Temples around the world and subsequently produced his honors undergraduate thesis comparing the musical styles and presentation forms of devotional music at the different Baha’i Temples. With the help of his colleagues from the Bienen School of Music, Mr. LaMountain has also presented two concert lectures on his comparative Baha’i musicological studies, which featured musical excepts from his worldwide research trip. Interested in inter-religious musicology and cross-cultural studies, Mr. LaMountain has achieved proficiency in French, Italian, and Hindi, passed upper-level courses on various traditions of the major world religions, and studied musical traditions, such as Negro Spiritual, Western Classical, Hindustani, Ugandan traditional, and Nueva Cancion Chilena musical styles. Mr. LaMountain aspires to pursue a graduate degree in sacred music studies, become a religious studies and musicology professor, and continue singing in choirs over the course of his life.

With his Fulbright-Nehru project, Mr. LaMountain is both observing and participating in the process of devotional music making at the prayer services of the Asian Baha’i House of Worship, called the Lotus Temple. In comparing both these observed musical styles and presentational forms of the Lotus Temple with other faith spaces in Delhi, for example Akshardham and ISKCON Temples, Gurudwara Bangla Sahib, Myanmar Buddha Temple, and Moti Masjid, Mr. LaMountain is determining the manner in which local worship music from religious traditions outside of the Baha’i Faith influences intonation of the Lotus Temple.

Suraj Kushwaha

Mr. Suraj Kushwaha is a recent graduate of Princeton University, where he studied a self-designed curriculum for an independent major in Postcolonial Environmental Studies. His research interests center around South Asian languages, culture, and history. He has lived and studied in India for two years, first on Princeton’s Bridge Year Program in Varanasi and later on a Boren Scholarship for intensive Hindi language study in Jaipur and Mussoorie. He is especially interested in the Himalaya, its people, and the complex environmental, economic, and cultural conflicts that have arisen with the opening of this region to unprecedented numbers of pilgrims, tourists, and mountaineers through globalization and development. His research interests include the imperial legacy of Himalayan mountaineering and the role of mountaineering in the formation of an “Indian” identity. His senior thesis probed the role of local knowledge in the colonial exploration of the Himalaya and Tibet. He hopes to address the absence of local people’s and porters’ perspectives in the history of mountaineering by collaborating on oral history and ethnographic research alongside these communities.

After the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Mr. Kushwaha hopes to pursue graduate studies and a career as a professor. Outside of his studies, Mr. Kushwaha gravitates toward the remote, vertical environments of mountains near and far. As an avid climber and aspiring mountain guide, he views climbing as a transformative medium to connect with environment, self, and others. He is constantly pushing his own limits in climbing and helping others to break down barriers and do the same.

Mr. Kushwaha’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring and documenting the histories and lived experiences of porters working in India’s Central Himalayan Mountain tourism industry. By observing porters on their assignments and conducting interviews with consenting porters, he hopes to identify key issues facing porters in an evolving labor geography. The research seeks to address the omission of porters’ perspectives from the discourse on the legacy of imperialism in the Himalaya. Mr. Kushwaha hopes to highlight porters’ crucial role in a growing industry and understand the challenges they face as they navigate a nuanced labor niche inflected by a history of British imperial exploration.

Andrew Kerr

Mr. Andrew Kerr is currently pursuing a PhD in Anthropology. His research world revolves around questions of poetry, semiotics, emotion, and sociality. Meanwhile, his commitments and passions are to always be engaged in collaborative work that centers human dignity. Mr. Kerr is a previous fellow with the American India Foundation and Urdu language resident director in Lucknow for the South Asia Flagship Language Initiative. He holds a BSc in Physics from Austin Peay State University, an MA in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago, and is always seeking to learn more.

Mr. Kerr’s Fulbright-Nehru project engages contemporary poetry in North India as not only literature or art, but also as a medium of popular expression that carries affective force in the public sphere. This study is taking place in Delhi, Lucknow, and Mumbai to explore questions about the public sphere, publics, affect, and imaginations of being Indian. The highlight on Urdu poetry, especially, will address the dearth of ethnographic analysis in Urdu studies, while also bringing an extended study of Urdu poetry in India into the growing body of literature in the anthropology of poetry.