Three Indian American Women Honoured With 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship
The Guggenheim Foundation recently announced its fellows for the year 2022. Three Indian American Women, Suparna Rajaram, Manisha Sinha and Jyoti Puri are among the fellows selected.
The Guggenheim Foundation announced its fellows for the year 2022 on April 7 this year. The Guggenheim fellowship is a grant awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those who have provided exceptional abilities and contributions to any form of art in any field of knowledge. Out of 2,500 applicants, 180 fellows were selected across 51 fields. And three Indian American Women– Suparna Rajaram, Manisha Sinha and Jyoti Puri – were among the fellows selected. Two Indian American Men, Manjul Bhargava and Prashant K Jain were also the recipients of the fellowship.
Suparna Rajaram
Suparna Rajaram is a distinguished Professor of Psychology at Stony Brook University, New York. She is an Indian-born cognitive psychologist and expert on memory and amnesia.
Suparna Rajaram was born in Bellary, Karnataka, India. She received a B.A. in Psychology, Economics, and English Literature and an M.A. in Psychology from Mt. Carmel College of Bangalore University. She moved to the United States to pursue an M.S. in Cognitive Psychology at Purdue University and completed her degree in 1988. She continued her education at Rice University, where she obtained her PhD in Cognitive Psychology in 1991. From 1991 to 1993, Rajaram was a post-doctoral research fellow at Temple University School of Medicine, where she conducted research on amnesia.
Rajaram joined the Faculty of Psychology at Stony Brook University in 1993 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2003. She served as the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University (2012-2015). She was appointed as Psychonomic Society’s Chair of the Governing Board in 2008. Between 2017 and 2018, she was serving as the President of the Association for Psychological Science. In 2001, she founded the Women in Cognitive Science organisation to promote the involvement of women in the field.
She received the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for her research on learning and memory and the social dimensions of memory.
Manisha Sinha
Manisha Sinha is an Indian-born American historian in American History at the University of Connecticut. Sinha’s research focuses on early United States history, especially the transnational histories of slavery and abolition and the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Her authored book ‘The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition’ was maned Editor’s Choice by New York Times and was even longlisted for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. Another book by her titled ‘Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina’ featured in the ten best books on slavery in 2015 in Politico. She has written for many big names including The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN and many others.
Manisha’s awards and fellowships include the James W.C. Pennington Award by the University of Heidelberg, Germany in 2021. She was elected to the Board of Trustees at the Connecticut Historical Society in 2021. She is an Elected Member of the Society of American Historians since 2018. She is the elected Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society since 2017.
Jyoti Puri
Jyoti Puri is a Professor of Sociology at Simmons University, Boston, USA. She is a leading feminist sociologist who advocates for transnational and postcolonial approaches to the study of gender, sexuality, state, nationalism, and death and migration.
Jyothi Puri was born and raised in India. She is an alumna of Northeastern University. She is an active member of the American Sociological Association, has chaired its Section on Sex and Gender and served on committees. She is a founding member of the Caucus on Gender and Sexuality in International Contexts. She was a co-host for the Feminisms Unbound speaker series and the Gender and Sexuality series at the Mahindra Humanities Centre at Harvard University.
Jyoti is the author of three books: ‘Woman, Body, Desire in Post-colonial India’, ‘Encountering Nationalism’ and ‘Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle against the Anti-Sodomy Law in India’. Her book ‘Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle against the Anti-Sodomy Law in India’ received the Distinguished Book Award from the Sociology of Sexualities Section of the American Sociological Association
The scholar has also published several articles as well as chapters in various journals about sexuality and gender. Along with the Guggenheim Fellowship, Jyoti Puri has also received the Rockefeller Research Fellowship and a Fulbright Senior Research award. She served as the deputy editor of the journal Gender & Society and has also co-edited the journal Foucault Studies.
-Staff Reporter
