LMSAI’s Scholars in Residence, left to right: Ajmal Khan Areethala; Yaqoob Khan Bangash; Kheya Melo Furtado; Manjot Kaur; Dhara Mehrotra; Mariam Zia; Annie Rachel Royson.
The Mittal Institute is pleased to host a number of Fellows and Visiting Artist Fellows this spring semester. Fellows are scholars and practitioners who come to Harvard to utilize the university’s resources to contribute to self-driven, independent research. Visiting Artist Fellows are mid-career visual artists from around South Asia who spend eight weeks at Harvard researching a topic of their choice, guided by a Harvard faculty mentor, as well as presenting a solo show of past work at the Mittal Institute. This spring we will have six fellows in our Cambridge office, and one in our New Delhi office.
Fellows – Cambridge
Ajmal Khan Areethala is the Raghunathan Family Fellow. He works at the intersection of Environment, Development, and Democratic Politics in India.
Yaqoob Khan Bangash, a United States Educational Foundation in Pakistan (USEFP) Fulbright Fellow, is a historian of Modern South Asia and a current Fulbright Fellow at the Mittal Institute. His current research interests lie in the emergence of Pakistan as a post-colonial state, with broader interests in decolonisation, modern state formation, formation of identities, and the emergence of ethnic and identity based conflicts.
Kheya Melo Furtado is the Jamnalal Kaniram Bajaj Fellow. She works as a faculty member of the Healthcare Management program at the Goa Institute of Management, India. Her areas of research, consultancy and teaching are health systems financing and public health. Her current research focusses on policy and implementation assessments of India’s national publicly financed insurance scheme, the Ayushman Bharat- Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana, as well as other state-level health protection schemes in India.
Manjot Kaur is a Visiting Artist Fellow from India. Her drawings, paintings, and time-based media attempt to decolonize both the sovereignty of ecology and women’s bodies. Her works explore what it means to be human, what it means to be non-human, and where these meanings rupture and collide.
Dhara Mehrotra is a Visiting Artist Fellow from India. Dhara’s work celebrates patterns in how things organize themselves. Her recent works reflect upon the form, fabric, structure and topology of Mycelium networks under the soil. The purpose is to realize synergy and interrelation between space and things to outgrow the notion of isolated consciousness.
Mariam Zia, the Syed Babar Ali Fellow, is an Assistant Professor and Coordinator, Department of Social Sciences, Lahore School of Economics, Pakistan. Her research interests include theory and culture, the ‘uncanny’, storytelling, and translation. During her fellowship at the Mittal Institute, Dr. Zia will be working on her translation of the first volume of Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s multivolume study of the 46-volume Dastan-e Amir Hamza titled Sahiri, Shahi, Sahibqirani: Dastan-e Amir Hamza ka Mutalea (Sorcery, Magic, Kingship: A Study of The Adventures of Amir Hamza).
Fellows – Delhi
Annie Rachel Royson, a Mittal Institute India Fellow, is a literary scholar whose research lies at the intersections of translation, South Asian literature, religious studies, travel writing, and memory studies.