Field of Study USA: Psychology

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.

Rhône Grajcar

Mr. Rhône Grajcar graduated from Whitman College in 2021 with a Bachelor of Arts in History and South Asian & Middle Eastern Studies. At Whitman he explored South Asian religions and US foreign policy, culminating in eight months spent in India on a David L. Boren Scholarship. He has followed his interests to internships at the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the South Asia Practice at the Albright Stonebridge Group. He is eager to deepen his understanding of South Asia religions and contribute to the study of shrines during his Fulbright-Nehru grant.

Mr. Grajcar’s Fulbright-Nehru project involves ethnographic field work at Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki Dargah in New Delhi and Dargah Yousoufain in Hyderabad, within the dargahs’ compounds. By engaging the dargah attendees in conversation, the project seeks to understand how COVID-19 and its impacts on daily life have affected the sense of community dargahs are renowned for. These shared spaces rely on crowded gatherings and communal food during langar to build their inclusive potentialities, which will present challenges in a post-COVID world. Situating the project in the understanding of dargahs as discursive, rather than fixed spaces, Mr. Grajcar hopes to help capture how these resilient institutions and their exploratory authority weather the disruptions of the pandemic.

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.

Joshua Shelton

Joshua Shelton is a doctoral candidate in the Religious Studies Department at Northwestern University where he specializes in Buddhist and critical masculinities studies. His research focuses on the phenomenological textures of religious manhood in Tibetan tantra, seeking to illuminate the inflection points between masculinity as an abstract concept and manliness as an embodied enactment. His dissertation pursues these questions by attending to the life and writings of the nineteenth-century tantric virtuoso Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé, the gun-wielding, deer-hunting, beer-drinking tantric master descended from a line of “bloodthirsty bandits” in eastern Tibet.

Joshua earned his bachelor’s in religious studies and English literature at Georgetown University where his thesis on demon possession was awarded the Theta Alpha Kappa Award for excellence in undergraduate research. After college, Joshua spent two years at the Georgetown University Law Center working on his JD degree before deciding his passion for education and social service would be better served by a career in academia and activism. Joshua continued his graduate training in Buddhist studies at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder where he received the Moore Fellowship to conduct historiographic research on tantric masculinity for his master’s in Buddhist studies. At CU, he also served as the editor-in-chief for the university’s NEXT journal. He currently serves as the coordinator for the Khyentse Foundation Buddhist Studies Lecture Series at Northwestern University.

Joshua’s Fulbright-Nehru research is attending to the life, writings, and historical context of Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé. His project emphasizes the structural roles masculinity plays as both abstract ideology and embodied practice in Tibetan religious history. Ultimately, Joshua’s thesis seeks to de-essentialize masculinity by situating it within history and alongside politics, economics, and sociology. It also emphasizes the role of non-secular Indigenous cosmology in the felt textures of religious manhood.

Sahita Manda

Sahita Manda is a recent graduate of the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health with a BS in public health sciences and a minor in biochemistry. She has had a longtime interest in working with people with disabilities, both through her research exploring stigma and neurodiversity as well as through her volunteer work. Sahita is also greatly interested in health policy and has interned at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. She hopes to pursue a career as a physician by integrating the principles of medicine and public health.

For her Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, Sahita is conducting nine months of research at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bengaluru, India. She is exploring parental perspectives and experiences related to seeking clinical and non-clinical services for adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD); she is also examining the navigation of the physical, sexual, cognitive, social, and emotional changes that come with adolescence. Sahita is also studying the lived experiences of adolescents with ASD. Using aggregated data from semi-structured interviews, she is identifying the current gaps in services and opportunities for this population, with the eventual goal of informing the development of culturally appropriate, holistic care.

Lauren Bausch

Prof. Lauren Bausch teaches at Dharma Realm Buddhist University, located in the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Ukiah, California. A specialist in the philosophy of the Brāhmaṇa texts, she is interested in exploring the relationship between Vedic tradition and early Indian Buddhism. She is the editor of Self, Sacrifice, and Cosmos: Vedic Thought, Ritual, and Philosophy (2019) and has written articles such as “The Kāṇva Brāhmaṇas and Buddhists in Kosala”, “Philosophy of Language in the Ṛgveda”, and “Bráhman as the Absolute in Late Brāhmaṇa Texts”. She completed her PhD in Sanskrit from the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2015.

Including a life-changing undergraduate semester in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Delhi and three semesters of dissertation fieldwork at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Prof. Bausch has been to India to study languages, conduct research, deliver lectures, and to volunteer. She has given invited lectures at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, the National Museum, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Savitribai Phule Pune University. She received the first annual International Association of Sanskrit Studies’ Honorary Research Fellowship in 2019 and organized a Vedic conference at Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune.

Prof. Bausch looks forward to building a community of scholars and practitioners that facilitates collaboration among Vedic and Buddhist specialists in the United States and India. She hopes that the book resulting from this Fulbright-Nehru research touches its readers by revealing something about their roots and will also give scholars of Hinduism a more comprehensive understanding of Vedic tradition and scholars of Buddhism a sound basis for understanding the cultural background of Gotama’s teachings.

Prof. Bausch’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the philosophy of language and causality that is articulated in middle and late Vedic texts. She is identifying and examining the discourses within these texts around the nature of man and the absolute creating itself to experience relativity, while situating the philosophy of the Brāhmaṇa texts in the intellectual history of India. Rather than interpreting ritual activity through the lens of Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta, her research is probing the cosmologies, mythologies, and explanatory connections found throughout the Brāhmaṇa texts themselves. The results are expected to shed more light on the relationship between late Vedic thought and early Buddhism.

Michelle Pu

Michelle Pu is a recent graduate from Tufts University, where she studied biology and child studies and human development. She is passionate about learning how she can best support the neurodiverse and disabled population throughout their lifespan. As an undergraduate student, Michelle worked in a rehabilitation center serving neurodiverse and physically disabled adults. Motivated by this experience, she worked in the Crehan Lab at Tufts University delivering a sexual education curriculum to autistic teenagers and researched how autistic adults interact in intimate relationships. She also worked in the Feinberg Broder-Fingert Lab at UMass Chan Medical School investigating an early-intervention curriculum for young children with social communication challenges. Besides, she conducted a research project regarding electronic communication devices for physically disabled adults. It was Michelle’s experiences as a mental health hotline operator, hospice volunteer, and as a volunteer working with housing-insecure children that shaped her interest in supporting others’ mental health and social well-being at all ages and life stages.

In her Fulbright-Nehru research project, Michelle is investigating the impact of affiliate stigma on caretakers when they disclose their child’s autism diagnosis to others. Affiliate stigma is defined as internalized stigma felt by the family members of a stigmatized individual. While previous studies have established that Indian parents of autistic children may experience affiliate stigma, research has not yet investigated the effects of such stigma. For her research, Michelle is conducting semi-structured interviews with caregivers of autistic children in Bengaluru regarding their experiences in navigating their child’s diagnosis.