On Monday March 24, the University announced that two faculty members have received fellowships. Prof. Ulka Anjaria (ENG) was awarded the Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship, and Prof. Naghmeh Sohrabi (HIST) was awarded the Mellon New Directions Fellowship. Both fellowships are funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Anjaria applied to the fellowship to fund research for her book on "how new political imaginaries in contemporary India are represented in recent literature, popular Hindi film and television," Anjaria wrote in an email to the Justice. "Although I have access to many of these new texts from the US, I felt I needed a year of research in India to fully put these works into context."

After spending two weeks in India in January as a visiting fellow at the University of Delhi in New Delhi Anjaria "saw how much the humanities were flourishing in India." She is looking at India's contemporary culture and how social injustice is still an issue. "I am interested in the ways new political imaginaries are actually emerging in new literature and films, despite what seem like their capitalist story lines. As the nature of politics changes in India, literature and film represent these politics, but also try to imagine new futurities for India, outside of the dominant nationalist discourses," Anjaria wrote.

Sohrabi, the Charles Goodman Professor of Middle East History and associate director for research at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies, is one of 10 professors around the United States to receive the New Directions Fellowship.

"I'm interested in going beyond the more traditional explanations for the 1979 Iranian Revolution in particular and revolutions in general that focus on political events, ideology, and economic factors," Sohrabi wrote in an email to the Justice. Sohrabi spent parts of her childhood in Iran and the United States during the revolution, and learned about it through school and stories from those around her.

Sohrabi is "ecstatic" to have the opportunities that the fellowship will give her. "As an historian, I know well how to read documents and records, and even conduct oral histories. But anthropology, defined very broadly, as the study of culture, allows the historian to bring the intangible, the experience, missing from official records, into the historical narrative," Sohrabi wrote.

Sohrabi will use the fellowship to "both get formal training in anthropology while at the same time conducting research." She will miss her students while she is on leave. "I will be taking some courses in anthropology this summer and doing interviews in North America, and then will be in Paris for the Fall semester and at Oxford for much of the Spring, with trips planned to Iran and various European cities where there are sizable Iranian communities."
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