This academic year, the Mittal Institute has supported 20 graduate and PhD students from across the different schools at Harvard who conduct research focused on South Asia. These Graduate Student Associates (GSAs) engage in monthly working groups to receive feedback from one another and exchange ideas. In Fall and Spring showcases, 14 GSAs presented their research to their peers and to Mittal Institute affiliates. Explore the presenters and their research below!
Bhavya Jain presents her research in April 2025.
Bhavya Jain is an architect from India and a Master of Design (Ecologies) candidate at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Her work questions the relations between socio-ecological networks, infrastructures, and the built environment, and how they take form and shape in our building practices. She has been researching the evolution of landscapes, water infrastructures, and paradigms of their material production in the context of climate change-induced urgencies in India.
Poorna Swami (image, center) presents her research in December 2024.
Poorna Swami is a PhD student in the Department of South Asian Studies, with a secondary field in Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Her research interests include South Asian feminist histories, Urdu and Hindi print cultures, Third World intellectual networks, and performance. A prize-winning translator of Urdu literature, Poorna is currently translating works by Safiya Akhtar and Fahmida Riaz.
Pradish Poudel presenting in April 2024.
Pradish Poudel is a primary care physician and social entrepreneur from Nepal. He is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Global Health Delivery at Harvard Medical School. In his presentation, he outlined challenges for primary care in rural Nepal. He is also the founder of Nepal Health Corps (NHC), a network of young healthcare professionals working towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC) by 2030 in both rural and urban communities across Nepal.
Image, left: Shaharyar Zia in April 2025. Image, right: Shreya Raj
Bhutani in May 2025.
Shaharyar Zia is a PhD candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC). He works on the tradition of Arabo-Islamic intellectual history in the Persianate Hindustan, particularly focusing on 17th-19th centuries. In trying to situate and analyze these pedagogical traditions, he is also interested in the wider networks that spanned and connected these scholarly traditions to the rest of the Muslim world. In his presentation at the Mittal Institute, Shaharyar spoke about Islamic pedagogical traditions in India. He is also interested in poetic cultures of South Asia and nuanced representations of diverse Muslim cultures (MENA and South Asia) on popular media and film.
Shreya Raj Bhutani is a Master of Urban Planning candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is interested in the intersection of socioeconomic status, gender, and property in South Asian diasporic communities. In her presentation, she summarized her research on South Asian- owned and operated eyebrow threading parlors in Jackson Heights, Queens, NYC, through the lens of urban planning and land use law. Her research aims to illuminate the role of cosmetic home businesses in larger social and economic networks.
Iqra Saleem Khan presents her research in April 2025.
Iqra Saleem Khan is an adjunct professor at Northeastern Law and an SJD candidate at Harvard Law School. Her dissertation explores the role of Family Law Exceptionalism (FLE) in the postcolonial nation-building projects of Bangladesh and Pakistan, and the rise of Blasphemy Law in the latter as a counter-exceptional domain of national identity. More broadly, her research interests are in the areas of gender and the law, legal theory, and Islamic law.
Adhitya Raghavan in December 2024.
Adhitya Raghavan is pursuing a Master of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is also the co-founder of Nirmaan, a venture committed to addressing the issue of unreliable electricity in rural India, which he talked about at the Mittal Institute. Adhitya hails from a village in South India, where he experienced firsthand the challenges of power disruptions.
Image, left: Priyamvada Gannavarapu in May 2025. Image, right:
Arnaaz Ameer in May 2025.
Priyamvada Gannavarapu is an architect and currently pursuing a Master of Architecture in Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. As a designer, she is dedicated to exploring the dynamics of sustainable urban development in the context of globalization. Her research delves into the morphology and transformation of traditional Indian cities and how contemporary urbanization impacts their identity. At the Mittal Institute, she presented a city planning proposal for the site of the Qutub Shahi Tombs in Hyderabad, India.
Arnaaz Ameer is a S.J.D candidate at Harvard Law School. Her doctoral dissertation is focused on exploring post-war reparations and lessons from private law remedies. Specifically, she explores doctrinal arguments for reconceptualizing reparations mechanisms through insights from international law, private law, and ethics.
Vaishnavi Patil in December 2024.
Vaishnavi Patil is a PhD candidate in the Department of History of Art + Architecture specializing in South and Southeast Asian art. Her dissertation examines the evolution of the “mother-child” iconographic type in South Asia to illuminate the religious lives of ordinary people through the lenses of gender, trans-regionalism, and trans-sectarianism. Her scholarly interests also encompass cross-cultural interactions within Asia. Her recent scholarship also includes writings on contemporary South Asian Art.
Elizabeth Karron in April 2024.
Elizabeth Karron is a PhD student in the History of Science Department at Harvard University. Her research examines how the modern history of global health has been shaped by ecological disruption, disease transmission, and migration brought about by nineteenth-century empires. In her presentation, she elaborated on historical uses of bacteriophages and their potential for treating antibiotic-resistant infections.
Image, left: Fatima Hamdani in December 2024. Image, right: Kartik Srivastava in December 2024.
Fatima Hamdani is a graduate student at Harvard Graduate School of Design, pursuing a Master of Design Studies (Ecologies) at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Her research investigates the socio-cultural and historical dynamics of urban spaces in South Asia, particularly focusing on Karachi, Pakistan. Her current project examines the interconnectedness of coastal cities and communities in the Indian Ocean, emphasizing Karachi’s historical, cultural, and economic networks.
Kartik Srivastava is a PhD candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research focuses on development economics, labor economics, and political economy. His current projects include studying the role of segmentation in labor markets and in firm networks in India, as well as how the delivery of public services in rural areas can be improved with the use of technology-aided accountability mechanisms.
Phusathi Liyanarachchi in April 2025.
Phusathi Liyanarachchi is currently pursuing a Master of Theological Studies at the Harvard Divinity School with a focus on Gender, Sexuality, and Religion. Her research interests lie at the intersections of literature and religious studies with a focus on grief, mourning, psychoanalysis, and gender—especially pertaining to folk or pre-modern literature as well as ritual practice in South Asian contexts. At the Mittal Institute, she presented her research on the tooth relic worship in Sri Lanka. Her work is further enriched by her creative practice as a poet and a translator, where she concerns herself with testing the limits of language, especially the ways in which grief, memory, and the sacred interact in creative spaces.