Archives: Meet Our USA Fulbrighters

Urmila Mohan

Dr. Urmila Mohan is a public anthropologist of material culture and studies how sociocultural values are circulated through cloth, bodily practices, and belief. She earned a PhD in anthropology from University College London, an MFA in studio arts from Pennsylvania State University, a BA (hons) in anthropology from Victoria University of Wellington, and a BFA in communication design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.

Dr. Mohan’s research includes an ethnography of devotees who make garments for their deities and also wear specific clothing; this was published as Clothing as Devotion in Contemporary Hinduism. She also undertook a curatorial study of Balinese ritual textiles at the American Museum of Natural History, resulting in an exhibition and catalogue, Fabricating Power with Balinese Textiles. Besides, she is the author of the monograph, Masking in Pandemic U.S..

Dr. Mohan has written extensively on material practices and theorizes them in her edited volume, The Efficacy of Intimacy and Belief in Worldmaking Practices. Earlier, she had co-edited The Material Subject: Rethinking Bodies and Objects in Motion and a special issue of the Journal of Material Culture titled “The Bodily and Material Cultures of Religious Subjectivation”.

As part of her commitment to interdisciplinarity, Dr. Mohan founded the digital, open-access publication, The Jugaad Project. She is also a member of several global working groups, including the Matière à Penser network for embodiment studies.

Dr. Mohan’s Fulbright-Nehru project is an ethnographic study of weavers of silk ikat (resist-dyed) textiles in Gujarat, India. She is contextualizing ikat handloom innovation as a process of socio-technical ‘enchantment’ that engages weavers, traders, and consumers. She is also connecting woven cloths’ agency with changing socioeconomic and spiritual practices via weavers’ technical, bodily, and material adaptations. Her research adds to studies of how artisanal communities and heritage are shaped in India; it is doing so by analyzing shifts in practices/meanings due to migration, the influence of kinship on technology adoption and craft expansion, changing roles of women in weaving families, and the effects of the geographical indications patenting system.

Phanikumar Mantha

Dr. Phanikumar Mantha is a professor of civil and environmental engineering (College of Engineering) and professor of MSU AgBioResearch (College of Agriculture & Natural Resources) at Michigan State University (MSU), East Lansing. He obtained his PhD in engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, and worked as a scientist at the National Aerospace Laboratories, Bengaluru, where he developed models of estuarine and coastal ocean processes and received the Sir C.V. Raman Young Scientist Award for his work in 1996. His research interests encompass the scientific, technical, societal, and policy aspects of water involving water quantity, water quality, public health, and water–energy–food systems. As a faculty member at MSU for over 25 years, he has worked with students and colleagues to address societally relevant water issues. Examples include: the development of process-based, coupled, physical–chemical–biological models and their applications to understand and predict coastal water quality in the Great Lakes region of North America; quantifying the effects of droughts on crop yields in Kenya and in Cambodia in the Mekong River Basin; and integrated hydrologic modeling of watersheds in the U.S. and UK. He has published in journals like JGR Oceans, Limnology and Oceanography, Water Resources Research, and Journal of Hydrology. Prof. Mantha was also a Lilly Teaching Fellow at MSU.

Prof. Mantha’s research is funded by grants from agencies like the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the United States Department of the Interior. He is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the International Association for Great Lakes Research and a fellow of the Geological Society of America.

The ecological products and services of India’s coastal environments are increasingly being impacted by harmful algal blooms (HABs). Effective strategies for their mitigation call for an understanding of the key factors behind their formation. Prof. Mantha’s Fulbright-Nehru project is studying coastal water quality with a focus on HABs and the use of mathematical models and field observations to gain novel insights into important processes and drivers.

Asif Majid

Dr. Asif Majid is a theatre researcher, educator, maker, and consultant who scripts, stages, and traces local and global nodes of history, power, performance, race, and (de)coloniality, particularly by attending to the intersection of Islam and performance; devising community-based participatory theatre; and making improvisational music. Currently, he is assistant professor of theatre and human rights at the University of Connecticut where he is also affiliate faculty in anthropology; Asian and Asian American studies; interdisciplinary indigeneity, race, ethnicity, and politics; and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. He received his PhD in anthropology, media, and performance from The University of Manchester and his work has been funded by organizations like the Fulbright Commission, the Wallace Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Dr. Majid has served as an Arts Research with Communities of Color Fellow, Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow, and Lab Fellow. He has also published in numerous journals like The Drama Review, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, and Contemporary Theatre Review. His performance credits include association with The Kennedy Center and the Royal Exchange Theatre. His book, Making Muslimness: Race, Religion, and Performance in Contemporary Manchester, is forthcoming with Routledge in 2025. He can be found online at www.asifmajid.com.

Muharram commemorations of the death of Hussein ibn Ali – Shi’a Muslims’ third imam and Prophet Muhammad’s grandson – in Lucknow and Hyderabad represent India’s largest iterations of the world’s biggest, transnational, annual, public mourning ritual. In his Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Majid is conducting a performance-based study of Muharram processions and poetry via participant observations, interviews, and autoethnography to examine how these practices make, unmake, and remake Indian transreligious harmony. This research will result in scholarly/public essays and a book project involving: Shi’a, Sufi, and Hindu studies and performance studies; Muharram studies in the under-researched Indian context; and transnational comparisons of Muharram within Indian disaporas.

M.J. Levy Dickson

Ms. M.J. Levy Dickson is an artist and educator. She explores global interconnectedness through her artwork and discovers common denominators in the natural world. She finds in nature patterns of color, light, mood, subject, texture, and sound that transcend conventional boundaries, such as those between sight and sound, land and water, or time and space. These discoveries are reflected both in her artwork and her teaching.

Ms. Dickson’s body of work is deep and varied, and questions the boundaries between abstract, representational, and expressionist art forms. It was while illustrating the book Wildflowers of Nantucket, as well as many brochures for conservation organizations, that Ms. Dickson became aware of the global similarity between flowers and plants in nature and textile patterns. She has exhibited her installations with New York Parks and Recreation Art in the Parks Program, as well as with the Historic House Trust of New York. She has also worked with poets and musicians to foster combined sensory communication.

Ms. Dickson has held teaching positions as artist-in-residence in Tangier and with The Farm in Jaipur. She has designed and taught in the art studio at Michael Graves College, Wenzhou-Kean University, in China. She has also taught at MIT and the Boston Architectural Center, and was the first artist-in-residence at the Perkins School for the Blind. She is currently teaching in the Studio One Program of Fountain House in New York. She has always welcomed opportunities to work with people who have special needs.

Ms. Dickson received a diploma from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; her BFA from Tufts University; and her MFA from Boston University.

In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Ms. Dickson is illustrating how people can be brought together through nature and art. Beginning her project from a woodblock printing studio in Jaipur, she is preparing a catalog of its design motifs by identifying each plant species and where it grows. She is also working with artists in India to create sculptures inspired by wildflowers using repurposed materials.

Vinay Lal

Dr. Vinay Lal is a cultural critic, writer, and professor of history and Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He earned his BA and MA from Johns Hopkins University in 1982. This was followed by a year-long stint in Australia and India on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship studying cinema. He earned his PhD with distinction from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Prof. Lal was the William R. Kenan Fellow (1992–93) at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University and immediately thereafter moved to UCLA where he has remained ever since.

Prof. Lal’s intellectual and research interests include comparative colonial histories, the politics of knowledge systems, cinema, cultures of sexuality, the global histories of nonviolence, and the thoughts of Mohandas Gandhi. He has authored and edited 21 books, including the two-volume Oxford Anthology of the Modern Indian City (2013); The History of History (2003); The Fury of Covid-19: The Politics, Histories, and Unrequited Love of the Coronavirus (2020); and Insurgency and the Artist: The Art of the Freedom Struggle in India (2022). Prof. Lal is a founding member of the Backwaters and Metaphysics Collective and the editor of the three volumes that emerged from this initiative. He is also the Academic India (Humanities) Delegate (2022–25) of the Oxford University Press. He maintains an extensive academic YouTube channel – https://www.youtube.com/user/dillichalo. He also writes frequently for the Indian Express and Open Magazine. His forthcoming books include two volumes of his collected papers on Gandhi.

Gandhi’s march to the sea at Dandi has long been recognized as a pivotal moment in India’s anti-colonial struggle. Prof. Lal’s Fulbright-Nehru study, based on archival, museum, and field research in India, is attempting to furnish a different understanding of this paradigmatic instance of nonviolent resistance in world history. The argument is that the Salt March can be read more productively – interculturally and intertextually – alongside Gandhi’s satyagraha march in South Africa (1913) and the traces it has left around the globe.

Alyssa Heinze

Alyssa Heinze is a PhD Candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. She researches gendered understandings of: the political economy of local development; political inequality; and the consequences of climate change. She is a two-time Fulbright fellowship recipient. Alyssa holds an MSc in economics from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a BA in political science and South Asian studies from Dartmouth College. She has worked for the Impact Data and Evidence Aggregation Library project at the World Bank; she was part of the Research, Evaluation and Data Team at IDinsight and of the Women’s Economic Empowerment Unit at the U.S. Department of State. She has also done stints with Vera Solutions in Mumbai, India, and with Chhori in Kathmandu, Nepal.

 

In her Fulbright-Hays project, Alyssa is examining how state policies – community water governance and drought relief programs – can mitigate the gender inequalities caused by drought. She hypothesizes that women’s inclusion in these policies is pivotal for the prevention of drought-induced gender inequality. Alyssa’s study is located in Maharashtra, India, a region susceptible to the adverse effects of drought. Employing a mixed-methods approach, she is gathering qualitative and quantitative data to assess the causal relationship between state intervention, drought, and gender inequality. This study is expected to inform policy formulation on increasing the resilience of climate-vulnerable communities across India.

Devin Creed

Devin Creed is a PhD candidate in South Asian history at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Devin’s dissertation examines the changes in the practices and ideologies of “giving for eating” in the context of famines in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asia. At Duke, Devin has been a Kenan Graduate Fellow, a Capper Fellow in intellectual history, and a fellow at the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge. He has made public presentations on: the erotica of the pickle in South Asian literature and history; traces of Portuguese cuisine in modern West Bengal; the political theory of B.R. Ambedkar; and the history of Catholic missions in Meghalaya.

He has previously received grants to conduct research in Philadelphia (on the Knights of Labor), London (on British famine policy), Northern Ireland (on martyrdom in the Irish Republican Army), and India (on famine relief). He received his MA in modern European history from Villanova University (Pennsylvania) and his BA in economics and English literature from Hillsdale College (Michigan).

Devin is an avid cook and food experimenter who spends a good deal of his time pickling, fermenting, baking, and cooking. He enjoys reading science fiction, watching films, backpacking, hiking, singing, and learning languages

Devin’s Fulbright-Hays project is analyzing how South Asians contributed to, contested, and adapted nascent forms of Western humanitarianism, in the process forming hybrid cultures of care and charity. Concurrently, he is examining the arrival of modern nutrition science as a developmental technology of colonial governance which clashed with indigenous foodways. The phrase “giving for eating” highlights his novel approach to the study of famines; this approach combines an archaeology of annadana and other food-gifting practices with a material analysis of famine foods. This turn to the alimentary allows him to show the ways in which endemic famine became constitutive of modern regimes of charity and foodways in South Asia. Devin is accomplishing this through studying archival materials in Bangla, Urdu, Hindi, and English, and by drawing on neo-materialist methods to recreate famine foods.

Ramakanth Kavuluru

Dr. Ramakanth Kavuluru is a professor of biomedical informatics (Department of Internal Medicine) in the College of Medicine at the University of Kentucky (UKY). He also has a joint courtesy appointment in the Department of Computer Science at UKY. He graduated with a PhD in computer science in 2009 from UKY with a focus on the security properties of pseudorandom sequences. Subsequently, he worked in knowledge-based search systems for focused bioscience domains as a postdoctoral scholar at Wright State University. Since 2011, he has been working as a faculty member at UKY focusing on natural language processing methods and their use in biomedicine and healthcare.

High-level applications of Dr. Kavuluru’s research include cohort selection for clinical trials, literature-based knowledge discovery, computer-assisted coding, social media-based surveillance for substance abuse, and clinical-decision support for precision medicine. He employs methods from machine learning (including deep learning) and data mining fields to drive his research agenda. His recent methodological contributions deal with zero-shot and few-shot classification, large language models, transfer learning, domain adaptation, and end-to-end relation extraction. Thus far, in his capacity as primary advisor, he has helped seven doctoral students and 10 master’s students attain their graduation.

Predicting disease onset ahead of time is an important application of artificial intelligence (AI) and this is being actively pursued in the U.S. and other western nations. From a global health perspective, it is not clear if the implications of the findings of U.S. patient-based modeling translate to more populous and diverse areas of the world. Thus, using latest machine learning methods and data sets from Indian healthcare facilities, Dr. Kavuluru’s Fulbright-Nehru project is rigorously assessing how well the promise of AI holds when applied to the Indian patient setting compared to the simpler standard-of-care approaches to risk stratification.

Aparna Kapadia

Dr. Aparna Kapadia is associate professor of history at Williams College. She is a social historian of early modern and modern South Asia. Her research particularly focuses on western Indian regional cultures, identities, and power structures as well as the subcontinent’s links with the Indian Ocean networks. Dr. Kapadia studied at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, from where she received her PhD in 2013. From 2009 until 2011, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford.

Dr. Kapadia is the author of In Praise of Kings: Rajputs, Sultans and Poets in Fifteenth-Century Gujarat (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and co-editor of The Idea of Gujarat: History, Ethnography and Text (Orient Blackswan, 2010). Her articles have appeared in several peer-reviewed academic journals like The Mediaeval History Journal and The Journal of Asian Studies. From 2021 to 2024, she served as associate editor at the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Dr. Kapadia also enjoys writing for popular asudiences. Since 2019, she has been publishing a column on a variety of topics in South Asian history called “Off Centre” in Scroll.in, one of India’s leading independent English-language digital publications.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Kapadia is conducting research for her upcoming book, Walking with the Mahatma: Kasturba Gandhi’s Political Life. This will be the first historically grounded and archivally researched biography of Kasturba (1869–1944), Mahatma Gandhi’s wife, which seeks to illuminate her pivotal but overlooked role as a political activist during India’s anti-colonial movement.

Beena (Veena) Howard

Dr. Beena (Veena) Howard is professor of Asian religious traditions in the Department of Philosophy at California State University, Fresno. She holds the Endowed Chair in Jain and Hindu Dharma, and also serves as the director of the M.K. Gandhi Center: Inner Peace and Sarvodaya. Her publications include the books Gandhi’s Global Legacy: Moral Methods and Moral Challenges (ed., Lexington, 2023); The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy and Gender (ed., Bloomsbury, 2019); Dharma, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and Sikh Traditions of India (ed., I.B. Tauris, 2017); and Gandhi’s Ascetic Activism: Renunciation and Social Action (SUNY Press, 2013). She has also authored numerous peer-reviewed articles, including “The Nonviolence Conundrum: Political Peace and Personal Karma in Jain and Hindu Traditions”; “Nonviolence as Love in Action: James Lawson’s Transforming the Promise of Jesus’ Love into a Practical Force for Change”; “Divine Light and Melodies Lead the Way: The Santmat Tradition of Bihar”; “Lessons from ‘The Hawk and the Dove’: Reflections on the Mahābhārata’s Animal Parables and Ethical Predicaments”; and “Rethinking Gandhi’s Celibacy: Ascetic Power and the Empowerment of Women”. Notably, she has served on the Board of Trustees of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Dr. Howard is also a TEDx speaker.

Using philosophical and textual approaches and women and gender studies theories, Dr. Howard’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is seeking to create a conversation with the Jain advocates of women’s equality and education, Shrimad Rajchandra (1867–1901) and Virchand Gandhi (1864–1901), while studying the life and work of the female Jain activist, Mridula Sarabhai (1911–1973). Born in a distinguished family, Sarabhai adopted an austere life, defied patriarchal norms, and made heroic efforts to rehabilitate abducted Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim women in violence-stricken areas. Through archival resources, engagement with faculty and students at the International School of Jain Studies and local universities, as well as through interviews with the Sarabhai family and Jain female leaders and followers, Dr. Howard is seeking to further the questions of women’s struggle against gender bias and violence.