Home Institution USA: Brandeis University

Medha Asthana

Medha Asthana (they/them/theirs) is currently pursuing a PhD in anthropology at Brandeis University where they study kinship and domestic spaces, intergenerational care, queerness, and gender in North India. Medha is an educator committed to inclusive higher education pedagogy and was recently chosen as a fellow with the MLA Institutes for Reading and Writing Pedagogy at Access-Oriented Institutions. Beyond their academic research, Medha is committed to publicly engaged work with grass-roots community organizations. They also hold a BA (honors, cum laude) in anthropology and a BA in business administration from the University of California, Irvine.

Medha’s Fulbright-Nehru project is studying the role of the family and the domestic space as constitutive of queer identity and belonging, especially for queer individuals socialized as daughters. They are examining daily relations between queer daughters (which includes cisgender women, non-binary people, and transgender men) and their mothers and other female kin in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh; this involves topics of gendered expectations, narratives of care, and negotiations of power.

Annika Agarwal

Annika Agarwal graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a major in anthropology in May 2023. While in school, she was the campus chairperson of Global Brigades where she organized menstrual products for communities in Honduras. She also founded Screen to Street, an organization that conducts home visits and educational programs for Latina women in their prenatal and postpartum periods. Besides, she worked as a birth doula at Magee-Womens Hospital, Pittsburgh, where she helped countless mothers during their birthing experience. One of her most valuable undergraduate experiences was developing her research skills and repertoire through Dr. Sara Baumann’s lab in Pittsburgh. During that time, she spent a summer in Mumbai, working with orphan girls to understand institutionalized menstrual practices, attitudes, and knowledge production. She has also worked on projects related to Collaborative Filmmaking, a participatory arts-based method, to understand the postpartum experiences of women in Pittsburgh. Annika will build on these experiences and skills through her Fulbright year. Ultimately, she hopes to attend medical school and continue her work on women’s health research globally.

Due to insufficient sanitary services, slum women in Dharavi, Mumbai, face a predicament. While they use dilapidated community toilets that make menstruation a communal issue, taboos perpetuate a clandestine culture. Of the sparse research that has been done on menstrual disposal, men and elders stand excluded. Therefore, this Fulbright study asks: “What are the attitudes, practices, and knowledge around menstrual disposal among men and women of different ages in Dharavi?” For her research, Annika is using Collaborative Filmmaking to co-create films on menstrual disposal with the residents. This study will contribute to the knowledge on differential bodily autonomy based on gender, a prominent issue in both the U.S. and India.

Shalini Puri

Prof. Shalini Puri has a PhD from Cornell University and is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests span postcolonial, Caribbean, gender, and memory studies; indentureship, slavery, and incarceration; environmental humanities; and social movements. She is especially interested in interdisciplinary and fieldwork-based humanities methods that explore the intersection of the arts, everyday life, and social justice.

Prof. Puri co-founded the Pitt Prison Education Project. She is the author of The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory and the award-winning The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity. She has co-edited Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities: Methods, Reflections, and Approaches to the Global South and several other books. She also edits Palgrave Macmillan’s New Caribbean Studies series. Currently, she is working on a book titled “Poetics for Freshwater Justice”.

As part of her Fulbright-Nehru project, Prof. Puri is collaborating with scholars at Ashoka University to explore how a comparative study of the Caribbean and India can reframe postcolonial studies and build enduring mechanisms for south–south exchange. The specific foci of the collaboration is research, teaching, advising, and capacity building to facilitate a cross-regional study of migration, environmentalisms, and water justice using the lens of literature and interdisciplinary humanities.

Hannah Davies

Hannah Davies earned an MS and BS in neuroscience and a BS in psychology (magna cum laude) from Brandeis University within four years. Hannah’s master’s thesis on the visual mechanisms involved in balancing was awarded the highest honors within the neuroscience department, and her research is being expanded by senior researchers at Colorado State University who aim to create AI models that assist pilots in maintaining aircraft stabilization mid-flight. During her time at Brandeis, Hannah assisted in teaching organic chemistry to undergraduate students and received the Emily Dudek Undergraduate Teaching Award for her effective teaching methods. Additionally, Hannah coordinated SPECTRUM – a volunteer program providing free mentoring, tutoring, and group play resources to children with disabilities – throughout her four years at Brandeis.

After graduation , Hannah was awarded the two-year Donald J. Cohen Fellowship in developmental social neuroscience at the Marcus Autism Center, a leading institution in the U.S. for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This research fellowship also led to Hannah co-authoring a paper which was published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. Hannah is also performing her own independent research on children regarding the genetic likelihood of autism. She has presented her clinical research at the 2024 Gatlinburg Conference and at the 2023 annual meeting of the International Society for Autism Research. Outside of research, Hannah coordinates the NIH-funded FirstFocus Study aimed to validate eye-tracking technology as an autism diagnostic tool within the first year of life.

Hannah’s Fulbright-Nehru project is objectively analyzing the efficacy of the Caregiver Skills Training (CST) program using mobile healthcare technology. The CST program, being implemented at AIIMS Nagpur, is addressing autism service insecurity by teaching caregivers how to mediate autism interventions at home. As part of her study, Hannah is quantifying children’s social behavior, sensory sensitivity, and motor functioning from children playing tablet games and watching videos, before and after CST programming, in the hope of improving awareness about CST benefits.