Student Research

Below is a brief description of the current research, academic work and accomplishments of CSAS affiliated graduate students.

*If you would like  your name added to this list, please send a brief bio to Nancy Becker. (nbecker@umich.edu)

Graduate Student Research

Amit Ahuja is a PhD candidate in the department of Political science. He holds a Bachelors in Economics from St Stephen's college, University of Delhi and a Masters in Development studies from the School of Oriental and African studies, University of London. He is writing his dissertation on the political mobilization of marginalized groups. The work focuses on Dalit mobilization, and attempts to explain the variation in success of Dalit-based parties across four states in India: Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Bihar. His research interests are located in the areas of Political participation, Ethnic politics and Political economy of Development.

Amit is currently a Rackham Predoctoral fellow and a Telluride scholar. He is also the winner of the Outstanding GSI award for the year 2005.

Vandana Baweja is a doctoral student in history and theory of architecture, at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, at the University of Michigan. She works as a graphic designer at the Center for South Asian Studies. Vandana was trained as an architect in New Delhi, India. She worked as an architect in Delhi and also as a consultant to weekly a TV series on contemporary Indian architecture. She got her master's degree in histories and theories of architecture at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London, UK. For the Max Mueller Bhavan (Geothe Institute) in New Delhi, Vandana designed and curated an exhibition on Berlin architecture after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her research interests are: historiography of modern architecture in "non-Western" contexts, intersection of colonial and nationalist histories of architecture, and post-colonial queer and feminist challenges to the history of architecture.

Monika Bhagat is a first year doctoral student in English. She earned her B.A. in English and political science from Emory University. There she wrote an honors thesis on the 1947 Partition of British India, a project for which she conducted archival research at the British Library. Her thesis analyzed the history and literature of the Partition and explored how the shared trauma of the event continues to exert substantial effects on the subcontinent.  Also as an undergraduate, Monika interned at the Southern Center for International Studies in Atlanta, where she prepared teacher training materials on South Asia and organized a South Asian film festival. As a graduate student she looks forward to continuing her study of how literature responds to traumatic events, particularly in South Asia.

Sayan Bhattacharyya is a doctoral student candidate in Comparative Literature. He grew up in Calcutta, India, and completed his bachelor's degree at Jadavpur University, India. He holds a master's degree in Computer Science and a master's degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His main research and teaching interests are in the colonial and postcolonial literature of South Asia and in political theory. He is also interested in theoretical connections between the humanities and the sciences, and in the development of innovative teaching methods in the humanities using appropriate use of information technology.
His doctoral research consists of a comparative study of the writers Rabindranath Tagore and C.L.R. James, especially with regard to their engagement with questions of modernity and liberation. Sayan has recently been selected for the University of Michigan's Honors Fellowship for the year 2006-07.

Anthony Brasher is a fifth-year student and is interested in historical linguistics and the phonetics/phonology interface. His dissertation work looks the effects of clear speech and coarticulation.

Elizabeth Bridges a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology with a subfield concentration in Archaeology, has completed two field seasons in Karnataka on the Early Historic Landscapes of the Tungabhadra Corridor project with Professor Carla Sinopoli, Director of the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology. She has also studied the Kannada language in Mysore on the AIIS Summer Language Program and has taken one semester of Telugu at U-M. Her dissertation concerns the regional political economy of the Keladi-Ikkeri Nayakas and their interaction with the Vijayanagara Empire of Medieval South India.

Laura Brown is a fourth year student in linguistic anthropology. She first developed an interest in the interactions between language use, markets, and everyday talk in South Asia while writing an undergraduate thesis on women working for high tech companies in Bangalore, India as an undergraduate at Stanford University. Laura has further pursued these interests through course work in Tamil language, South Asian history, sociolinguistics, and anthropology while in a co-terminal anthropology master's program at Stanford and a doctoral program at the University of Michigan. She has also spent two summers studying Tamil at the AIIS summer program in Madurai, India and conducting a pilot study of language and script use in advertisements and other public signs posted in several small South Indian cities. She recently defended a dissertation proposal to investigate the ways in which language use amongst people who frequent petty shops in Thanjavur, India reproduces and responds to different kinds of relationships as identified by participation in markets, mass media, and everyday interactions. Her work focuses on shifting definitions of Tamil dialects, the ways in which dialects of Tamil and English come to be associated with particular groups and practices, and the ways in which these associations mark the boundaries between business and other kinds of activities. Laura expects to begin 18 months of field research on language use in Tamil Nadu this summer.

Francis Cody began his graduate career in the anthropology department in the fall of 1999. After three years of training in socio-cultural and linguistic anthropology, modern South Asian history, and Tamil language, he began fieldwork in Tamilnadu, India, in the fall of 2002. A fluent Tamil speaker, his work focuses on adult literacy movements, newspaper production and consumption, relations to the state as mediated by literacy skills, and relationships of ownership to productive land as mediated by written culture. He has returned to Michigan in the winter of 2005 to write his dissertation, and he continues to be an active participant in Kitabmandal, the South Asia reading group, in addition to linguistic anthropology labs and other activities in the social sciences.

Sonia Das is a Ph.D. candidate in linguistic anthropology and is currently in the process of writing her dissertation. Her dissertation research, which is titled ?The Talk of Tamils: Representations of Language, Devotion, and Space in Montreal,? explores how linguistic and devotional practices are constructing political and social spaces in Montreal. Specifically, she is investigating how Roman Catholic and Hindu Tamils use different registers, expertise, and commodified forms of Tamil, French, and English in educational and religious settings to simultaneously create multiple sociopolitical spaces, such as the Tamil diaspora, the Sri Lankan Eelam transnation, and the Quebec nation. After completing her dissertation in April 2008, she plans to work in academia and to continue researching the historical and contemporary factors influencing the language politics of the French Tamil diaspora.

Christina Davis is a second-year Ph.D. student in linguistic anthropology. She has a B.A. from the University of Michigan and an M.A. from the University of Chicago. She has studied Tamil for the past four years and is beginning a study of Hindi. For her dissertation research, Christina is interested in looking at the role of linguistic practices in the way that Tamil migrants to Mumbai (Bombay) inhabit and make sense of urban spaces and places. She will be primarily working in Dharavi, a densely packed settlement in central Mumbai with a population of over a million. Her research will have implications for looking at the relationship between language, power, the state, language ideology, as well as issues of intra-Indian migration.

Manan Desai is a third-year doctoral student in the English Department.  He is currently working on a dissertation project that investigates the transnational connections between African-American literature and culture to Dalit social and literary movements in the state of Maharashtra.

Haley Gallagheris a second year master's student at the Center for South Asian Studies and the Ford School of Public Policy where she is pursuing her degree in Public Policy and her certification requirements for South Asian Studies with a focus on international grassroots and human development, education reform and human rights.  She spent four years in Bangladesh as a Peace Corps Volunteer and also working for an NGO, Save the Children, USA.  This past summer she completed an internship in Cambodia where she worked with an NGO on developing policies and programs to combat human trafficking, sexual exploitation and domestic violence of children.  Haley loves studying and speaking Bengali, is a strong advocate of human rights and participatory development and envisions herself working professionally in a number of different capacities including: the UN, USAID, an international NGO, or any non-profit organization.             

Matthew Gallon is a doctoral student in Anthropology. As an undergraduate at Bowdoin College, he wrote an honors thesis on the archaeology of the Indus Valley civilization and spent a semester studying in Nepal. After graduating, he spent two years as a research assistant at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History, where he analyzed archaeological collections and participated in multi-disciplinary field projects in Mongolia and eastern Canada. As a graduate student at the University of Michigan he has assisted with excavations at the Iron Age and Early Historic settlement of Kadebakele in Karnataka, India. His dissertation research focuses on the relationships between states, monasteries, and guilds in central and southern India during the Early Historic period (c. 300 BCE to 400 CE).

Pranav Garg is a PhD student in Strategy at the Ross School of Business. Pranav grew up in Delhi and obtained his undergraduate degree in Economics from Shri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi. He completed his MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) and then worked for three years with Hindustan Lever Limited (Unilever?s Indian subsidiary). His experiences as a student and as a professional in economically and socially diverse countries such as India, Germany and Vietnam intrigued him and motivated him to understand the phenomenon of globalization through the academic lens of management. His interest in academia took him back to IIMB where he worked for one year as a research assistant with Professor J. Ramachandran in the Corporate Strategy and Policy area before joining the University of Michigan.

Erika Hoffmann is a fourth year student in Linguistic Anthropology, currently living in Kathmandu, Nepal, conducting research for her Ph.D. dissertation. Her research focus concerns Nepal's emerging sign language and deaf community, and the manner in which the multi-functionality of language is both problematized and exploited as communicative practice is fitted to a likewise emerging public. The goal of her dissertation work is to contribute to theorization about sign language and deaf social life that will test rather than necessarily validate the limits of broader linguistic and social theory.

Anneeth Kaur Hundle is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology.  Having completed her BA in Anthropology and Gender Studies at Northwestern University in 2003, she continues to work with the South Asian diaspora in Kampala, Uganda. She is currently examining how practices of identity formation, cross-racial feminist activism, and the emergent politics of the Indian Ocean may be possible interventions to communitarian violence in Uganda. Anneeth is more broadly interested in the Punjabi/Sikh diaspora, Afro-Asian studies and video ethnography as methodology. She is also an active member of the Anthropology Diversity Initiative and the Ethnography as Activism Workgroup. She hopes to continue working in the field of urban anthropology.

Punnu Jaitla begins his M.A. in South Asian Studies at U-M this Fall 2007 semester. He earned his B.A. in International Studies from the University of New Orleans, where his coursework was interrupted, momentarily, by a rainstorm named Katrina. He spent the year after his graduation working with a variety of volunteer organizations in the New Orleans recovery effort. At U-M his research will focus mainly on Panjab and surrounding regions. To this end he will be studying both Persian and Urdu. His interests include subaltern movements in India, religious synthesis, linguistic identity, Panjabi literature and South Asian diasporic literature. He is also an avid drummer and likes to spend time canoeing and walking in the woods.

Hemanth Kadambi is a PhD candidate with primary interests in South Asian archaeology. Born in Bangalore, his early education was in New Delhi and Bangalore. He has a Bachelor's degree in history, economics and political science from St. Joseph's College, Bangalore. He also has a M.A. and a M.Phil in History from JNU, New Delhi. He has surveyed and excavated in India, New Mexico and will be excavating in Arizona this summer before proceeding to conduct archaeological survey in southern Deccan for his dissertation next year. His specific interests lie in investigating politico-economic and religious landscapes to understand interactions between ideologies of ruling elites and commoners.

Nirinjan Khalsa has spent the last seven years pursuing the study and performance of the Sikh percussion art of northern India, the jori, thus becoming its first woman exponent.  With a bachelor?s degree in Sociology from the University of Arizona, she is now in her first year pursuing her PhD in Asian Languages and Cultures with the goal of documenting and preserving this oral musical tradition through the use of written, audio, and visual modes.  She plans to explore how and why Sikh tradition uses music to express key concepts in its central scripture.  Nirinjan looks forward to being in the academic environment where she will gain the tools needed to relate the language of musical experience to theories of consciousness and subjectivity currently being discussed in the humanities.

Fareeha Khan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan. Originally from Chicago, Fareeha graduated with a BS/BA in Chemistry/English from Loyola University and with an MA in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Chicago. Fareeha is currently conducting research for her dissertation, titled "Reforming Law Through the Traditional Madhhab: Ashraf 'Ali Thanawi's Fatwa on Women's Right to Divorce," in which she plans to tackle issues related to Islamic law, traditional Islamic scholarship's relationship to modernity, women's issues, and the practice of Islam in British colonial India. Fareeha currently resides with her husband outside of New Haven, CT.

Niketa Kulkarni is in her final stages of completing her MA in South Asian Studies. She also received her Bachelors, with a focus on Political Science and Sociology, and JD from the University of Michigan. In 2002, she spent the summer months interning at a human rights organization in Dehli. In June, she will be returning to India for at least six months working at a microcredit organization in Bangalore. Her project will be funded by a fellowship offered through the law school. Her academic and work experience has helped her develop a particular interest in the intersection between law, society, and development, especially in India. Such a focus has gained much respect in both academic and advocate circles, as it provides a helpful basis for understanding and working with communities directly affected by the implementation of policy, especially in newly formed states.

Jane Lynch received a BA with honors in anthropology from Columbia University in 2001 and a MA in social science from the University of Chicago in 2007. She enters the PhD program in anthropology this fall with a FLAS Fellowship for the study of Hindi. Jane?s doctoral research will focus on the mobilization of traditional craft production in micro-enterprise projects in Western India. She anticipates this research will be enriched by the host of interdisciplinary opportunities available to her at the University of Michigan and through the Center for South Asian Studies.

Katherine Martineau is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology. She is currently finishing coursework and preparing for dissertation research in Jharkhand, India. Her area interests include the history of personal customary law (i.e. Hindu Code Bill), the structure of the legal-administrative system, the adivasi-rights movement, and the history of ethnological studies in India. Katherine studied Hindi at U-M with Dr. Mithilesh Mishra and in Jaipur on the AIIS-Hindi summer program. She will study Mundari upon her return to Jharkhand. Prior to her doctoral work, Katherine danced Odissi in Bhubaneswar, India. She now practices yoga.

Jane Menon is a graduate student in political science. Her interests lie at the intersection of religion and politics in South Asia. Jane graduated with honors from the University of Miami before earning an M.A. in languages and cultures of Asia from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Jane's current research focuses on the participation of Muslims in Indian politics. She asks why some Muslims have gained political clout and others not, how local circumstances affect the way in which Muslims choose to organize, and what has prevented the pan-Indian mobilization of Muslims after independence. The answers to her questions will shed light on the compatibility of Islam with democracy, the capacity of democratic states to incorporate religious minorities, the viability of political Islam outside the Middle East, and the choice some groups make to refrain from organizing along community lines even as others around them do so.

Sana Muttalib received her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Los Angeles where she completed a B.A. degree in Political Science and a minor in South Asian Studies. She is currently a second year law student at the University of Michigan. Her academic interest in South Asia stems from her interest in the political and social processes which exist throughout the region. She is especially interested in the role of minorities and communalism in India as she engaged in independent research in these two areas as an undergraduate student. Her interest in South Asian Studies was further heightened by her work as a research assistant to the chair of the South Asian Studies department at UCLA. Furthermore, she plans to apply her legal education to working with law firms who focus on international and foreign legal issues in the region. Thus, she hopes that a Graduate Certificate in South Asian Studies will allow her to gain a better understanding of South Asia to facilitate such an effort.

Shivaji Mukherjee's research interests include ethnic conflict, terrorism, and theoretical application IR to Third world.

Kirk Thomas Ott is a Ph.D. student in Asian Languages and Cultures, as well as a Graduate Student Instructor for classes introducing such things as "Hinduism" and "Asian Religions." In addition to graduate coursework related to the study of religion and South Asian history, Kirk has studied classical Sanskrit (including an AIIS Intensive Language Program in Pune) and modern Tamil (including a summer at the Pondicherry Institute of Linguistics and Culture). Under the guidance of Srilata Raman, Kirk will be exploring the emergence in the late 19th century of what has been called Neo-Shaivism -- a non-Brahmin movement which proposed an ancient culture of egalitarian, Tamil-speaking Shiva worshipers predating the appearance of Sanskrit and the Vedas on the subcontinent. He imagines this work will provide a valuable case study within larger theoretical concerns of religion and modern thought, such as category formation and classification, identity politics, and the ideal of "secularism." Kirk received his M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Colorado; his undergraduate degree in Religious Studies is from Montclair State University, where he also completed a major in Music. He grew up somewhere in northern New Jersey.

Afshon Ostovar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History. After completing his B.A. in Near Eastern Studies and History at the University of Arizona, he came to Michigan to continue his studies in the social and cultural history of the Middle East and South Asia.
While his current work concerns religion and culture in the Middle East, his broader interests include areas of difference, visuality, and slavery in both pre-modern and contemporary Muslim societies. Currently, he is working on his dissertation, which focuses on Iran?s Islamic Revolutionary Guards and the tensions between religion and nation in the Middle East.

Dan Packel is a doctoral candidate in Political Science. He is currently beginning dissertation fieldwork in Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal, in India's Western Himalayas, examining the relationship between social movements and the success of local governments in providing anti-poverty programs.  As an undergraduate, studying in an interdisciplinary social studies program at Wesleyan University, he spent a semester abroad in Nepal, learning Nepali and pursuing an independent study on the origins of the Maoist insurgency. At Michigan, he has pursued coursework in political economy of development, ethnicity and nationalism, and the relationship between development and environmental concerns. He has also pursued advanced Hindi study through the American Institute for Indian Studies. 

Wasim Quadir is a second-year master's student.  He hopes to focus his studies on the microfinance industry in Bangladesh, and on possible interactions with Islamic finance.  His research interests also include microfinance securitizations and on the international regulation of microfinance institutions.  Wasim is also pursuing a JD/MBA at the University of Michigan.

Andrew Quintman is a Ph.D candidate in Buddhist Studies currently completing doctoral research in Nepal on a Fulbright-Hays fellowship. He joined the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures after nearly nine years in the Himalayan region, where he served as Academic Director for the School for International Training's Tibetan Studies program. After completing a Masters degree at Michigan on the subject of Tibetan sacred biography, he began his doctoral work on the early biographical traditions of Tibet's renowned eleventh-century yogin Milarepa. His dissertation includes a study of the earliest known writings on the saint's life and explores the relationships between these literary sources and sacred biography embodied other media, such as visual narrative, sacred geography, and ritual practice. His interests also include trans-Himalayan history and culture, and the encounter between Tibetans and Newar Buddhists of the Kathmandu Valley.

Uzma Rahman is a first year student in political science. She grew up in Karachi, Pakistan where she received her high school education. Uzma received her bachelor's degree from Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania and then came to Michigan for further studies. Having majored in political science and international affairs at Gettysburg, she is now pursuing a PhD in the same field. Her area of interest is comparative politics with special focus on South Asia. She wishes to concentrate on political development in South Asia, especially Pakistan, and to gain a better understanding of the success/failure of democratic governments in the region. Current literature on South Asia focuses primarily on India with little reference to Pakistan. The modest literature on Pakistan is almost entirely area-focused and not central to disciplinary, systematic study. Uzma wishes to make Pakistan a topic of discussion in the more theoretic political science literature because Pakistan is a rich laboratory for answering some key questions in the discipline of political science.

Sumana Rajarethnam has a B.A. in Political Science from UCLA and a M.P.P. from the Ford School. Mr. Rajarethnam plans to study how the media, political parties, special interest groups and grassroots political organizations can engage citizens through the use of ICT (information and communication technology), how citizens will use the technology to fashion new forms of civic engagement, and how that will in turn affect public opinion during elections, primarily within, but not limited to, South and Southeast Asia.

Shahed Samadi graduated with a masters in Epidemiology from the UM School of Public Health. Shahed was born in Tehran, Iran. Before moving to the United States at the age of ten he lived in Paris, France for four years. He initially pursued his interest in public health at the University of Washington in Seattle where he obtained his bachelors of science before moving to Ann Arbor for graduate school. Due to his interest in the South Asian region Shahed completed his summer internship in Lahore, Pakistan on the topic of physician's knowledge and attitudes towards breast cancer. Shahed is interested in learning about the impact of cancer on various ethic groups both within the US and internationally. He intends to pursue a career in cancer epidemiology with the goal of making a significant contribution to the field of cancer prevention and control.

Sudipa Topdar is a Candidate in the Department of History. She completed her BA from Lady Shri Ram College and MA and M.Phil in History from JNU (New Delhi). Sudipa is interested in colonialism, childhood, school curriculum, the body, masculinity and native agency.
Her M.Phil dissertation studied colonial knowledge production and school textbooks in late nineteenth century as a means adopted by the British state to socialize native youths into a particular ideological paradigm in order to create governable colonial subjects. Currently, she is developing ideas of the body and masculinity with an emphasis on physical exercises and games in schools becoming a means of disciplining the native body ('effeminate' in some contexts such as Bengal). With the aid of the Rackham Humanities Research Award, she is on detached study in India and UK for a year.

Uthara Suvrathan is a first-year student in anthropology. Originally from Kerala, she grew up in Himachal Pradesh and Delhi, graduating from St. Stephen's College and completing an M.Phil at Jawaharlal Nehru University in the field of ancient Indian history, writing on the archaeology of central India (Vidarbha). At Michigan, she is planning to develop new skills as an archeologist, working both comparatively and across disciplines. She expects to join a dig in Africa this year and is also interested in classical archaeology. For her dissertation, she plans to return to her first love, the archaeology of the Deccan. This area is increasingly the focus of scholarly attention, offering important material for understanding early state formation and, specifically, for questioning commonly held assumptions about the dominance of northern polities in the subcontinent.

Jennifer Yim is a second year doctoral student in the joint program for personality psychology and women's studies. During her master's program coursework in the program for South Asian Studies, Jennifer focused on new reproductive technologies in India and their uses in sex-selection. For this project, Jennifer worked across the disciplines of psychology, public health, and women's studies. Jennifer still maintains these interdisciplinary ties for her current work on the relationship between machismo/chastity beliefs and well-being/anxiety in the Punjab, India, an area with the most skewed sex ratios in the country. For her dissertation, Jennifer is looking forward to researching Diaspora populations in the United States and examining the relationship between endorsement of model minority myth ideals with embodiment of masculinity in Asian-American men.