SAI is pleased to announce the naming of the Raghunathan Family Fellowship for South Asian Studies, with generous support from Advisory Council members Sribala and Arvind Raghunathan. Future scholars from South Asia will have the opportunity to take advantage of Harvard’s vast resources and produce valuable scholarship on the region.
“South Asia is an extremely rich and diverse topic for study. Given the complexities, we need a range of talent, so that collaboration can lead to innovative ideas and solutions. We decided to invest in finding this talent,” says Arvind Raghunathan. “We hope that Fellows bring new perspectives, perhaps because their training and experience is different from the scholars at Harvard. New perspectives lead to interesting conversations and collaborations, especially of the inter-disciplinary kind. Ultimately, that is a main goal of SAI.”
Below are testimonials from current and past recipients of the South Asian Studies Fellowship on the impact of their time at SAI:
“So far, the Fellowships has enabled me to concentrate completely on my research and aided me in the collection of exciting resources at Harvard. The opportunity to present my work at Harvard and receive comments has pushed me into exploring newer possibilities of my work and helped me in thinking about my project on Bombay dock workers in a more global and comparative perspective. Due to SAI’s association with a number of schools across Harvard, my interaction here with the faculty and students has been extremely enriching.”
–Shubhankita Ojha, Current South Asian Studies Fellow, 2016-2017
Learn more about Ojha’s work.
“I was a South Asian Studies Fellow right after finishing my doctoral degree and the fellowship gave me much needed time and space to think about my work in the broader context of ecological and urban concerns in South Asia. It gave me access to valuable resources directly related to my research such as Harvard’s extensive map library and cartographical resources. I also benefitted greatly from my interactions with my mentors, who approached my work from radically different disciplinary angles. The staff at SAI is deeply committed to forging interdisciplinary connections – not just across departments in the university, but also between undergraduates, graduates, faculty, and with institutions outside the university.”
–Chitra Venkataramani, South Asian Studies Fellow, 2015-2016
Learn more about Venkataramani’s work.
“I am currently a Lecturer on South Asian Studies and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. I am teaching courses on anthropology, religion, cinema, and literature, and completing a book manuscript on the politics and cosmologies of migrant workers in Delhi. The Fellowship allowed me to return to Harvard (from Delhi), interact with a wide range of scholars, present and discuss my work, teach a course (Capitalism and Cosmology in Modern India), and transition to the South Asian Studies Department. It is an honor to have been a grantee of this Fellowship.”
–Shankar Ramaswami, South Asia Studies Fellow, 2013-2014 Fellows
Learn more about Ramaswami’s work.
