Announcing the 2026 Center for South Asian Studies Graduate Fellows
The Humanities Institute is excited to help announce the 2026 Center for South Asian Studies Graduate Fellows. The CSAS Graduate Fellowship supports research and research-based travel projects related to South Asia, including conferences and conference travel.
A total of six graduate fellows from a range of fields – including Economics, History, Politics, Music, and Sociology – received $1,000 for their research projects, all of which demonstrate an impressive range of intellectual commitments and interests, from climate change in India and Indigenous labor restructuring in Assam to colonial monetary policy in India, Hindustani music, and the labor history of Central Indian coal mining. See below for more details on each graduate fellow and their project, and please join us in congratulating CSAS’s new cohort of fellows!
(From top left to right: Ameneh Eskandari, Noihrit Gogoi, Sagarika Pandey, Tanvi Rupakula, Vedarshi Shastry, Vidula Sonagra.)
The Center for South Asian Studies 2026 Graduate Fellows
Ameneh Eskandari (PhD Candidate, Politics)
Ameneh’s dissertation project examines racial hierarchies in Iran and Afghanistan and the processes of nation-state building, focusing on the experiences of Hazara communities in Iran and Afghanistan, where this ethnic group originated. Her CSAS fellowship supported initial fieldwork at a Hazara community in New York whose members have lived in Iran and Afghanistan and are now based in the United States, helping to broaden the scope of her project’s exploration of diasporic Hazara communities.
Noihrit Gogoi (PhD Candidate, Sociology)
Noihrit’s dissertation project explores land transformation and the changing relations amongst Indigenous communities in Assam, India. His CSAS fellowship supported fieldwork in Assam, which will contribute to an emerging scholarly dialogue about how labor is being restructured under conditions of new enclosure and land-grabs across the Global South, with particular attention to labor subjectivities in a frontier region context.
Sagarika Pandey (PhD Candidate, History)
Sagarika’s CSAS fellowship supported archival research for her dissertation project on the labor history of Central Indian coal mining and coal production for the global market between 1890 and 1940. She visited public and private archives across Central India, exploring various archives in New Delhi (National Archives), Raipur (State Archives, Chhattisgarh, and District Record Room), and Bhopal (State Archives, Madhya Pradesh, and District Record Room).
Tanvi Rupakula (PhD Candidate, History)
Tanvi’s research investigates money in the colonial turn in India, centering on how monetary policy was constituted by social, political, and economic transformations in South Asia, with a focus on the Madras Presidency. Her fellowship helped to support two archival research trips, one in the United Kingdom at the British Library and the Manchester University Archives, and another in India at the Tamil Nadu Archives.
Vedarshi Shastry (PhD Candidate, Economics)
Verdarshi’s fellowship supported a research trip to the United Kingdom to present a paper on climate change and structural transformation in India at the Royal Economic Society Annual Conference in Newcastle. He also conducted archival research at the British Library, gathering historical administrative data from the India Office Records for his dissertation project on Indian economic history and development.
Vidula Sonagra (PhD Candidate, Music)
Vidula’s research focuses on the labor of Hindustani musical instrument makers, exploring the intersection of musicology and labor studies. Her fellowship supported ethnographic fieldwork and data collection at instrument makers’ workshops, tanneries, and musical practice and performance spaces at major centers of instrument making in India, such as Miraj, Maharashtra, Kolkata, West Bengal, and Banaras, Uttar Pradesh.
CSAS Graduate Fellowships are made possible by the generous support of Kiran Malhotra and the Maitra Endowment.
Banner Image: Photo of a tree-lined landscape with a view of a river. Courtesy of Dolly Kikon.