Hyderabad: A University of Hyderabad (UoH) doctoral scholar has secured one of the most competitive international research fellowships, for historical studies of marginalisation and deviance in South Asia.
Anjana M Nair, a PhD candidate in the Department of History at UoH’s School of Social Sciences, has been awarded the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowship (FNDR) for 2026–2027. The fellowship supports advanced research in the United States for selected scholars.
Nair is pursuing her doctoral work under Prof. Suchandra Ghosh, head of the department of history at UoH. Her research examines crime and deviance across a long historical period from 2nd century BCE to 8th century CE. It studies how such categories were regulated in normative Sanskrit theological traditions and how they were contested in narrative literary traditions, the university told DC.
Beyond conventional markers such as status, dignity, and reputation, her work also explores social hierarchies and marginalisation through the ideas of deviant spaces and spatial outliers.
As part of the fellowship, Nair will work with rare manuscript variants available in repositories in the United States. She will conduct her research at the department of Asian studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas at Austin under the guidance of Prof. Donald R. Davis.
“What sets her research apart is the innovative stance taken as regards the methodology of using quantitative tools for terminological frequency analysis of spatial categories, alongside qualitative archival research,” Ghosh said.
Nair has previously received an Indian Council of Social Science Research grant under the International Collaboration Data Collection Scheme in 2025 and a GETTY grant in 2024 to attend the 36th Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art. She has presented her work in Lyon, Heidelberg, and Surabaya and published in reputed journals.
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