The Maharaj Kaul Memorial Fund provides support for graduate fellowships in the form of competitive grants of up to $1000 for research travel to South Asia and up to $500 for domestic conference travel. For further details on the application procedure and deadlines here .

Awardees

2023 Research
  • Aparajita Das (History): The Long Afterlife of Mughal Monuments: Sheesh Mahal, Shah Pir Dargah and Public History in India 

  • Sourav Ghosh (History): Muddle in the Middle? Sovereignty and State Formation in a Mughal Borderland (1652-1750)

2022 Research
  • Akshita Todi (South & Southeast Asian Studies):Generating a Communal Feeling: Marwari Women as Emotional Subjects in Hindu Texts and Ritual Performances
  • Aparajita Das (History): Flows of Change: Historicizing the Mughal Empire from the River Ganges (c.1550--c.1750)

2021 Research
  • Shaivya Mishra (History): The Bomb, the Bullet and the Gandhi Cap: Violent Nationalism and Political Surveillance in Colonial India, 1906-1945
2020 Research
  • Payal Hathi (Demography): Giving birth to death: women's wellbeing and the undercounting of stillbirth
  • Bharat Suri (Education): Learning on/ from a Platform: The (Re)engineering of Indian Education
  Conference
  • Nirvikar Jassal (Political Science): Why Are Female Bureaucrats Marginalized (And What Can Be Done)? Evidence from the Indian Police
2019 Research
  • Not Awarded
Conference
  • Shivani Sud (Art History): Between Ram Raj and British Raj: Tradition and Transformation in Jaipur Court Painting, ca. 1835-1880
2018 Research
  • Ashley Wagner (Public Health): Sanitation and Health Rights in India
  • Radhika Haridas (Urban Design): Designing for (socio-economic) co-existence in cities of high population densities: Reclaiming urban common space in Bandra, Mumbai
Conference
  • Sigrid Luhr (Sociology): Diversity, Identity, and Belonging in the San Francisco Bay Area Tech Industry
  • Thomas Oomen (Architecture):  Rethinking  Aesthetics: Delhi BRT and the Aesthetics of  Infrastructure  
2017 Research
  • Shaivya Mishra (History): “Revolutionary” Lives in Colonial India: Nationalism and Colonial Surveillance in the United Provinces, 1907-1944
  • Vaishnavi Surendra (Agricultural and Resource Economics): Do village moneylenders in rural India adapt to a changing credit landscape?
Conference
  • Mihiri Tillakaratne (Ethnic Studies): “These Moves Are Memories”: Embodied Memory, Sex, and Heteronationalism in Island of a Thousand Mirrors
2016 Research
  • Shivani Sud (Art History): Imag(in)ing Modernity: Artists and Painting Practices in Colonial Jaipur
  • Anustubh Agnihotri (Political Science): Party networks and decentralized governance in West Bengal, India
Conference
  • Sohini Pillai (South and Southeast Asian Studies): Bhakti at the Court: The Presence and Absence of Bhakti in Vernacular Mahābhāratas.
  • Lisa Brooks (South and Southeast Asian Studies): Diagnostics, Senses, and Subjectivities in Transition: Classical Āyurveda and Contemporary Āyurvedic Practice in Kerala
 2015 Research
  • Manaswini Rao (Agricultural Resource Economics): Sakala Sakhis
  • Yasir Hameed (City and Regional Planning): The Deepening Divide: Residential Segregation and Discrimination in the Housing Market of Delhi.
  • Amee Raval (Environmental Health Sciences): Effects of Occupational Heat Exposure on Traffic Police Workers in Ahmedabad, India
Conference
  • Gowri Vijayakumar (Sociology): ‘Why Should I Live?’ Sex Worker Activism and HIV Risk in Kolkata and Bangalore.”
  • Inderjit Kaur (Music): Privileging Sound: Authenticity, Authority, and Aesthetics in Sikh Sacred Music
  • Lauren Bausch (South and Southeast Asian Studies): Karma as Rite and Retribution: The Agnihotra
  • Karin Shankar (Theatre, Dance, & Performance Studies): Memory of the Image: ‘Witnessing Inwards’ in Amar Kanwar’s Films
2014  Research
  • Seth Garz (Agricultural and Resource Economics): Does Improving Slum Housing Induce Migration to Cities? A Natural Experiment in Urban India to Address a Theoretical Paradox
  • Vania Wang (Public Health): Quantifying catalase levels in patients with active tuberculosis and type 2 diabetes mellitus in Mysore, India
  • William F Stafford Jr (Anthropology): The Abject of Corruption
  • YiYi Mon Kyo (Art History): Transplantation of Tibetan Sacred Spaces: Qing Dynasty to the Present
Conference
  • David Boyk (History): "Thinking Backwards: Provinciality and Urbanity in Nineteenth-Century North India" to be presented at the Biennial Urban History Association conference in Philadelphia (October 9-12, 2014) and "Capital Flows: City and Region in Bihar" to be presented at the annual South Asia conference in Madison (October 16-19, 2014)
2013  Research
  • Michael Picetti (Public Health): Antimicrobial Resistance Prevalence in Uropathogenic Gram-Negative Bacterial Clonal Groups Associated with Community-Acquired Urinary Tract Infections in Mysore, India.
  • Ishita Ghosh (Information & Communications Technology and Development) Livelihoods and money management in distributed families via mobile phone in India.
  • Katya Cherukumilli (Environmental Engineering): Scaling up low-cost arsenic remediation for South Asia within a sustainable and scalable business model
  • Anoop Muniyappa (UCB-UCSF Joint Medical Program): Estimate the cost-effectiveness of the World Health Partners’ (WHP) social franchising and telemedicine program on health outcomes in rural northern India.
Conference
  • Bharat Venkat (Anthropology): "Untimely Morbidities." To be presented at the Annual Conference on South Asia. Madison, Wisconsin, to be held on October 17-20, 2013.
2012 Research
  • Mike Levien (Sociology): Role of land dispossession in India’s neoliberal development model
  • Hannah Archambault (South & Southeast Asian Studies): Eighteenth-century history of Afghan kingdoms in the southern Deccan and northern Carnatic regions of India.
  • Manisha Anantharaman (Environmental Science Policy and Management): Recycling Community or Reinforcing Hegemony? Green Consumption and Citizenship among the New Middle Classes of India.
  • Rajesh Veeraraghavan (School of Information) : The Contradictions of Bureaucratic Self-Monitoring: A study of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme(NREGA) in the State of Andhra Pradesh, India.
  • Kristen Powers (Economics): Role of the media in communal violence in India.
  • Anna Lieb (Mathemtics): Intermittent water supply modeling in urban India
2011 Research
  • Abhijeet Paul (South & Southeast Asian Studies): Spares are not available: Skills, Gender, and the everyday life of labor in Kolkata.
  • Allyson Goldberg (UCB-UCSF Joint Medical Program):  Medical Tourism in India.
Conference
  • Josh Williams (Performance Studies): “Spectacular Monstrosity: Abjection and the Carnivalesque in the Plays of Girish Karnad.” To be presented at the Annual Conference on South Asia. Madison, Wisconsin, to be held on October 20-23, 2011.
  • Karin Shankar (Performance Studies): “Being, Becoming, Belonging in Premchand’s Kafan” presented at the South Asia Graduate Student Conference held at the University of Chicago from March 3-4th 2011.
  • Michael Slouber (South & Southeast Asian Studies): “Snakebite Goddesses in the Sakta Traditions.” To be presented at an Oxford conference on Sakta Traditions to be held in Somerville College, Oxford, Sept 10-11, 2011.
  • Gowri Vijayakumar (Sociology): “Mapping Morality in the Knowledge Economy: Small-Town Women and the Rural BPO.” To be presented at the Annual Conference on South Asia. Madison, Wisconsin, to be held on October 20-23, 2011.