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.