Meet Our USA Fulbrighters Archive - Page 9 of 29

Christian Novetzke

Prof. Christian Novetzke received a BA from Macalester College, an MTS from Harvard University, and a PhD from Columbia University. Prof. Novetzke is Professor of South Asia Studies, Religious Studies, and Global Studies at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He is also Professor of the Comparative History of Ideas at UW. Prof. Novetzke’s books include The Quotidian Revolution (Columbia University Press 2016) and Religion and Public Memory (Columbia University Press 2008). He is also the co-author (with Andy Rotman and William Elison) of Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation (Harvard University Press 2016) and co-editor (with Jack Hawley and Swapna Sharma) Of Bhakti and Power (University of Washington Press 2019). Among his awards, Prof. Novetzke was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018 and a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow in 2013. His current projects include a book on yoga as political theory and practice with co-author Sunila S. Kale (under contract at Columbia University Press) and a book on the thought of Savitribai Phule, for which he was awarded the current Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship.

Savitribai Phule was born into an impoverished subaltern caste of Shudra agricultural workers in India in 1831. She became one of the first Shudra women in India to receive an education. She authored two books of political poetry in Marathi, each articulating her powerful vision for social justice and her fight against caste patriarchy. Her ideas about religion, caste, gender, and power made her one of the most important critical thinkers in Indian history. However, Savitribai Phule is hardly known outside of India. With Fulbright-Nehru’s support Prof. Novetzke hopes to complete his research on a book on the critical thought of Savitribai Phule.

Nancy Neiman

Prof. Nancy Neiman has been a Professor of Politics at Scripps College since 1994. She has won numerous teach, scholarship and community service awards. She has taught a wide range of political economy courses including, Markets and Politics in Latin America, the Power Elite: Surveying the Influence of Business over Public Policy, and Infrastructures of Justice. Prof. Neiman teaches a Political Economy of Food course through which she has organized a number of community engagement projects that bridge theory and practice among which are a social enterprise organized with women who were formerly incarcerated, a program called Plant Justice with students at an alternative high school, and a Meatless Monday program that brings students and women who were formerly incarcerated together to share prepare and share meals and food justice programming. She also teaches Napier intergenerational learning courses and Inside-Out courses inside a local prison. Her most recent book, Markets, Community and Just infrastructures, includes a variety of case studies, including an interfaith coffee cooperative in Uganda, Cuban financial reform, globalization in Juárez Mexico, and the US meatpacking industry, to provide a framework for understanding the conditions under which markets promote or undermine social justice.

Focusing on pastoralist women in Gujarat India, the Fulbright-Nehru project of Prof. Neiman intends to track several key coping strategies and practices during Covid-19 among Gujarati pastoralist communities during the pandemic: the struggle over access to grazing lands and the ability to maintain traditional livelihoods, access to healthcare, navigating women’s traditional roles and their role as leaders, and promoting agrarian citizenship. Using qualitative data analysis gathered from interviews and quantitative ARCGIS survey data tracking pastoralist migratory patterns and community welfare, this project hypothesizes that pastoralist identities in Gujarat support, and are supported by, a broader transformational food sovereignty movement.

Venkateswaran Narayanaswamy

Dr. Venkat Narayanaswamy is an Associate Professor of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at North Carolina State University. He obtained his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin and bachelor’s degree at IIT Madras, both in Aerospace Engineering. He was a postdoctoral fellow at RWTH Aachen, Germany, before joining the faculty of North Carlina State University.

Dr. Narayanaswamy’s research is in the area of combustion and aerodynamics. He focuses on complex processes of turbulent flows with emphasis on emerging clean energy and future transport. His work emphasizes advancing the current state of the art using cutting edge measurement technologies. The tools that were developed in his lab provided novel insights into the underlying flow and chemical processes that cause soot emissions. These tools will be extended to the host institution to obtain foundational understanding of the chemical processes that trigger forest fires and the aerodynamic interactions that cause the fires to spread over large geographic areas. This research can significantly advance the ability to predict the occurrence and spread of forest fires that will help develop early fire warning systems and fire probability maps that can help strategize future regional development.

Dr. Narayanaswamy has authored over 80 publications in this topical area, including an Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics article in 2014. He has been recognized with numerous research awards and honors including the AFRL Summer Faculty Fellowship (2022), AFOSR Young Investigator Award (2016), and ASEE Summer Faculty Fellowship (2016). He is also an alumnus of National Academy of Engineering’s US Frontiers of Engineering, Class of 2020. Dr. Narayanaswamy also served as an international coordinator on the SPARC award in India and is among the invitees of the VAIBHAV meet organized by the government of India.

A multiscale multi-organization research initiative is proposed to leap the current state of the art on the forecast and early warning of Indian forest fires. Dr. Narayanaswamy’s Fulbright-Nehru research aims to focus on making quantitative predictions of fire initiation probabilities and spreading rates in representative sub-Himalayan vegetation, weather, and terrain conditions. The objectives include: 1) Develop ab-initio chemical kinetics models for gasification and pyrolysis of representative organic vegetation. 2) Obtain models for crown fire initiation and spreading that are tuned for representative wind conditions and terrain. 3) Incorporate the model into in-house or commercial software and validate with existing data.

Rebecca Manring

Prof. Rebecca Manring’s adventures in India began with no visible trajectory. Her fascination with the country led her to seek out language instruction, and she found a Bengali teacher in her home town of Seattle. After working privately with her for a year, she began to study Sanskrit as one of the perks of employment at the University of Washington. She was quickly “hooked” and gained formal admission to the graduate program in Asian Languages and Literatures in 1985. Eventually, she realized that she could earn a living working with the languages, and the culture, she had come to love. In 1996, she joined the faculty of Indiana University as the first hire, after the founding director, in its new India Studies program, where she initially taught Sanskrit and Hindi, and soon added courses in literature, cinema, and religious studies. Prof. Manring’s position converted to tenure track in 2000. She was awarded tenure in 2007 and promoted to Full Professor in 2018. Her research on hagiographical literature in premodern Bengal resulted in the publication of two books. The research for those books was largely based on unpublished manuscripts, and the search for those manuscripts led her to many unforeseen places. Most notable was the private collection of the late noted linguist Sukumar Sen. His son Subhadra Kumar Sen allowed her access to those manuscripts, and eventually, granted Prof. Manring permission to microfilm them, as they both recognized their precarious condition. As they were cleaning and cataloguing those manuscripts, they found a complete manuscript of Rūparāma Cakravartī’s Dharma-maṇgala, and made plans to complete his father’s work of critically editing the text, and then producing an English translation. The second Prof. Sen died before they could make much of a start on that project, and so in his memory and homage she has completed the translation. Now, she wants to see what the text means to the people for whom it is important, and so she is embarking upon the final phase of the work with this text, namely, this ethnographic work.

Prof. Manring’s Fulbright-Nehru project proposes to continue the exploration of the contemporary ritual applications of Rūparāma Cakravartī’s mid-17th century Dharma-maṅgala, coupled with her translation and analysis of the text, will contribute to their understanding first of the breadth of pre-modern theological anthropology of Bengal, by which she means how people lived out their rituals and devotion to their chosen deities; and second, of how those practices extend into the 21st century.

Bengali maṅgala-kāvya have much to say about non-brahminical religious praxis and illuminate our understanding of daily rural life in the pre-colonial era, providing a means for expressing non-brahmanical views and values. Moreover, the performative nature of ritual life allowed and continues to allow lower groups in the normative hierarchy a place of power and importance.

Rumaan Malhotra

Dr. Rumaan Malhotra is a wildlife biologist with a background in endangered species conservation. More recently, he has been interested in the spatial ecology of human-tolerant species. Currently, he studies how various human impacts interact in their effects on native carnivores such as foxes and small wildcats. In particular, he is interested in the role of domestic dogs in driving native carnivore space usage. He earned his PhD from the University of Michigan, and his bachelor’s from Drexel University. Dr. Malhotra carried out his doctoral work in Southern Chile, where he found that agricultural landscapes were preferentially used by dogs, which affected where native foxes were found. As an avid photographer, Dr. Malhotra always has a camera in hand to document the landscapes, in which he works, and their wild inhabitants.

Dr. Malhotra aims to be studying the movement ecology of free-ranging domestic dogs in the Spiti Valley of Himachal Pradesh. He will be determining if distinct groups of dogs can be identified by their movement behavior, and if their movement corresponds with where threat of disease spillover is concentrated for humans and wildlife (specifically, rabies and canine distemper), with the spatial use of wildlife, and with livestock mortality.

Aman Luthra

Dr. Aman Luthra is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the George Washington University in Washington, DC where he teaches courses in political ecology, development geography, and the geography of South Asia. Prior to this position, Dr. Luthra taught in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, MI. Dr. Luthra received his PhD from the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering at the John Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. His research primarily focuses on the changing landscape of labor and capital in the waste management sector in urban India, with a particular focus on informal workers in this industry. In addition to research on urban waste management, Dr. Luthra is also involved in an inter- and transdisciplinary collaborative project using citizen science to understand changing patterns of pollinator diversity and abundance in and around apple orchards in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Dr. Luthra has published articles in several leading journals in geography including Antipode, Geographical Review, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space and Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.

Dr. Luthra’s Fulbright-Nehru project proposes to examine the changing nature of work in the informal recycling economy in urban Indian using mixed methods including surveys and interviews with traditional kabariwalas (buyers of recyclable materials) and new firms that that use digital technologies to try and stake a claim in this market space. In addition to contributing to scholarship on the increasing ‘platformization’ of services, Fulbright’s support for this research will not only contribute to the development of evidence-based policy prescriptions in India, it will also allow the researcher to learn from, contribute to and build long- lasting relationships at Ambedkar University, Delhi.

Aashish Kumar

Prof. Aashish Kumar (he/him) is a tenured Full Professor of Television and Immersive Media in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. His areas of expertise include documentary, interactive and immersive media, participatory media, and storytelling for social change. He is also the Founding Program Director of the Interdisciplinary Minor in Immersive Media, an innovative program launched in conjunction with departments from the Schools of Communication, Engineering and Computer Science, and Humanities, Fine, and Performing Arts.

Prof. Kumar is interested in emerging media forms that use innovative storytelling strategies to help people become more aware of internal diversities and the margins of their communities. To him, such an empathic understanding is key to forming broader solidarities and bridging the gap with “the other.” He is interested in how one’s process of capturing, representing, and distributing these stories can become integral to the overall intention of the storyteller. Prof. Kumar most recently launched an interactive documentary series focusing on the gender and sexual diversity within the South Asian diaspora in North America. Titled “Body, Home, World: South Asian LGBTQ+ Journeys,” the interactive online portal centers around narratives of LGBTQ+ identifying individuals and their families, allowing the viewer to navigate between these multiple viewpoints and to gain an understanding of the uniqueness as well as the interdependence of each experience.

Dr. Kumar is the recipient of two Fulbright Specialist awards (2016 and 2019) and a Fulbright Senior Scholar award (2008). In addition to teaching courses at all levels of the television curriculum he also serves on the Advisory Board of Hofstra University’s Center for Civic Engagement and the Center for “Race,” Culture and Social Justice.

Prof. Kumar earned an MFA in Television Production from the City University of New York, Brooklyn College, an MS in Radio/TV/Film from Indiana State University, and an MA and BA (Honors) in Sociology from the University of Delhi. He resides in New York City with his wife and son and enjoys playing the guitar and learning Hindustani Classical music.

Sexual minorities in India have made significant legal gains with two recent Supreme Court decisions – one that recognizes and protects the rights of transgender people and another that ends the criminalization of homosexuality. However, most LGBTQ+ activists contend that the campaign to change hearts and minds must take place over the long-term through the humanizing and normalizing of India’s LGBTQ+ community. Through his Fulbright-Nehru grant, Prof. Kumar proposes to capture the stories of families with LGBTQ+ individuals in short documentary films and make them available through an interactive online portal. These short films will center the experience of families as well as LGBTQ+ individuals, demonstrating that allyship and advocacy go together.

Elizabeth Kadetsky

Ms. Elizabeth Kadetsky is a journalist, essayist, and fiction writer whose work often explores uses of memory and the filters of perception that can influence, distort and protect it. Her explorations into nostalgia have led her to an interest in the layered significances around the topics of antiquities and patrimony. Her most recent book, The Memory Eaters, released in March 2020 and winner of the Juniper Prize in Creative Nonfiction, was featured in The Boston Globe, LA Review of Books, and The Rumpus and was named a top pandemic read by Buzzfeed. Her essays and short stories have been chosen for a Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and two Best American Short Stories notable citations, and they have appeared in The New York Times, Antioch Review, Gettysburg Review, the Nation, and elsewhere. Her other books include two works of fiction and the hybrid work of memoir and reportage First There Is a Mountain, published by Little, Brown in 2004 and re-released as an e-book by Dzanc Books in 2019. The latter came out of Ms. Kadetsky’s research as a student Fulbrighter to India during the first of her two previous Fulbright grants. She is an Associate Professor of Fiction and Nonfiction at Penn State University and a Nonfiction Editor at New England Review.

Ms. Kadetsky’s narrative nonfiction Fulbright-Nehru project follows the story of a set of Gupta era sapta matrika sculptures and their theft, export, and recognition as objects of exquisite beauty on the world stage. A work of general nonfiction, the research investigates what became of missing members of the set of sculptures, stolen from a temple in Rajasthan in 1956. A work of archival research, travel writing, history, reflection, investigative journalism, and creative nonfiction, Ms. Kadetsky’s project and its original research uses her lens as a mother and daughter to explore the layered significance of the sculptures’ journey(s) in the context of international calls for the restitution and repatriation of stolen artworks.

Sandip Mazumder

Dr. Sandip Mazumder is professor and associate chair of mechanical and aerospace engineering at The Ohio State University (OSU). He joined OSU in March 2004. Prior to OSU, he was employed at the CFD Research Corporation in Huntsville, AL, for seven years. He is one of the architects and early developers of the commercial code, CFD-ACE+™. His research is computational in nature and spans three main areas: computational fluid dynamics and heat transfer emphasizing on chemical reactions, with applications in combustion, catalytic conversion, fuel cells, batteries, and chemical vapor deposition; thermal radiation and its applications; and non-equilibrium transport phenomena as occurring in nanoscale systems. He has been active in raising awareness about global warming and climate change among engineering students and the general public through his classroom teaching and seminars. Dr. Mazumder is the author of two graduate-level textbooks, more than 65 journal papers, and over 65 peer-reviewed conference publications. He is the recipient of the McCarthy Engineering Teaching Award and the Lumley Research Award from the OSU College of Engineering. He has also been a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers since 2011.

In light of the fact that the U.S. and India are ranked second and third, respectively, among the highest carbon dioxide-producing nations, Dr. Mazumder’s Fulbright-Kalam project involves a collaborative one-semester part-teaching, part-research stint at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru. For this, he is creating and deploying two modules with the objective of increasing awareness about global warming and its causes among the future engineering workforce in both the countries. While the teaching module has a short ambit, the research module, titled “Hierarchical Models for Atmospheric Solar Radiation Transport and Earth’s Temperature Predictions”, is attempting to answer long-standing questions on the impact of greenhouse gases on global warming.

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.