I have worked on a number of projects related to South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, including the following:

I have also taken courses such as the History and Politics of South Asia at Oxford, and have taken (1) Post Colonial Theory, (2) Women and Agency in India, and (3) Critical Theory with a heavy emphasis in Indian Post Colonial literature during my time as an undergraduate at Emory.  I have also engaged in a number of programs, such as the Washington Leadership Program, focused on South-Asian-specific policy programming. Half of my family is from the Indian Himalayas and the other half of my family is from South India. Being a first-generation Indian in the United States, and having spent considerable time in the United Kingdom, I am especially interested in studying not only mainland South Asia, but also South Asian communities that have spread globally (the largest migration of the last century was of South Asians across the world). Asian Americans remain very understudied in the U.S. context of politics, and South Asians especially. In this PhD, I hope to engage in comparative methods to study the attitudes and behaviors of South Asian communities globally. 

I took several classes in African studies during my time at Emory, including (1) Sexual Violence and Humanitarian Interventions, (2) Sex, Power, Culture, and two human rights courses with a particular emphasis on SubSaharan Africa, including (3) Human Rights (undergraduate course) and (4) Human Rights (graduate level course with the Rollins School of Public Health). I also spent a significant amount of time also learning about the peacekeeping missions in these regions across these courses. 

I developed this research interest by taking more courses that used case studies from Central and Western Africa at Oxford Department of International Development.

At the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, I study early warning/early action systems in Central and Western Africa, especially in Nigeria. See more information about my role for this project here. 

Democratic Republic of Congo:
In my capacity at the Carter Center and the Institute for Developing Nations, I developed a strong research interest int he Democratic Republic of Congo and was supposed to attend to field work in the region before COVID 19 (in March of 2020!). For the Carter Center in particular, I ran the Democratic Republic of Congo Newsdesk and wrote grant reports related to peace developments and initiatives and appeals to the government on behalf of the Carter Center. Working in a nearly full-time capacity (35 hours/week) for the Center, I was able to develop a strong understanding of the ethnic conflicts in the region, the State capacity issues, and more. 

My work for the Emory Oppression-Resistance Lab, including instruction of more than 8 courses in the history of Northern Ireland and the Troubles, as well as working on more than two papers on Northern Ireland (associated below), have helped me develop a strong regional interest in Northern Ireland and resistance movements. See below here:

As a South Asian American, I am especially interested in how development issues trace over and map onto the U.S. context. The "developing/developed" binary is archaic and not telling, as all nations continually engage with theories of change, and not uniformly even within traditionally conceived of "developed" nations.  The U.S. faces many challenges in State capacity and repression, and civil rights are continually under attack, especially for ethnic minority groups -- and often at the hands of State violence, which fits into my research interest.