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Student Research
Graduate Student Research
Jane Menon
Political Science
Ph.D. Candidate
jmenon@umich.edu
Jane Menon is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her research interests revolve around political violence, religion, and women’s political participation in South Asia. Her graduate studies have been supported by a National Security Education Program David L. Boren Fellowship, an American Institute of Indian Studies Advanced Language Program Fellowship, Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, and numerous competitive grants from the University of Michigan.
Her dissertation analyzes how the internal dynamics of the Jamaat-e-Islami (“Islamic Party”), South Asia’s largest Islamist group, determine its varying choice between peaceful activism and political violence in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. She asks three broad questions: (1) Why are some radical organizations peaceful and others violent? (2) How do a radical organization’s internal dynamics shape its preference for peace or violence? (3) When a radical organization prefers peace or abstains temporarily from violence, how does it manage unauthorized violence by more militant elements within the organization? She expects to complete her Ph.D. in August 2013.
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Rohit Setty
Teaching & Teacher Education Program
Ph.D. Candidate
settyrb@umich.edu
Rohit Setty’s work focuses on the intersection of educational reforms and teacher education practices in international contexts. Having worked with teachers, policy makers, and political scientists in India over the past few years, his current work is an examination of the new national teacher education curriculum framework in India and the implementation and enactment of the bold reforms that it sets out.
Currently, Rohit has been awarded a USIEF Fulbright-Nehru grant. Under this grant, Rohit has been working with the Regional Institute of Education in Mysore, India. For eight months he has been studying the teacher training practices at this and other local institutions, and developing, conducting, implementing, and evaluating his own teacher educator training modules as part of his dissertation research.
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Hoda Bandeh-Ahmadi
Anthropology
Ph.D. Candidate
hba@umich.edu
Research Area Socio-cultural anthropology; world anthropologies, politics of knowledge production, academic cultures, kinship; South Asia/India, United States. Her project investigates how ethnographic theory develops and is passed on over generations through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research on anthropology and sociology departments in India since independence.
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Gurveen Kaur Khurana
Anthro-History
Ph.D. Candidate
Research: Sikh history in 20th century.
Gurdwaras have been immensely important to Sikh history through the twentieth century, yet their historical importance and impact on Sikh history remain uncharted. Through a study of gurdwaras I will attempt to understand political, social and cultural developments amongst a religious community of North India through the tumultuous twentieth century, both pre and post independence.
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Janak Rai
Anthropology
Ph.D. Candidate
rjanak@umich.edu, janakrai2007@gmail.com
Research Project: My dissertation research is an ethnography of indigenous peoples' movement in Nepal. My study investigates the quotidian and organized ways in which Dhimals, a historically marginalized indigenous community from Nepal’s easternmost lowlands, enact locally embedded cultural politics and globally influenced indigenous activism to assert their distinct history, territorial belongings and political autonomy as they participate in the process of crafting a new direction for the remaking of their nation.
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Hafsa Kanjwal
History and Women's Studies
Ph.D. Candidate
Social and Cultural History of Modern Kashmir.
Hafsa's work focuses on spatial transitions and anxieties in post-colonial Kashmir, looking primarily at the time period in between partition and militancy.
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