Publicly Engaged Research Fellowship
In 2023, Aruna launched its first cohort of publicly engaged research fellowship for college seniors and recent graduates who are interested in working with Aruna members to explore social, cultural, and humanistic issues impacting Asian Global South and its diasporas.
This fellowship is intended to co-create a network of care and a supportive space of knowledge production for emerging scholars and thinkers with systematically marginalized backgrounds in mainstream academia.
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Each fellow attend bi-weekly seminars on topics of publicly engaged research over the course of three months. Throughout the fellowship, each fellow work with individual mentor whose intellectual interests align with theirs to further develop their works, culminating in a final project at the end of the three-month period.
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Meet our 2023 inaugural fellows below.
Anshuman Tripathi
Mentor: Cheryl Yin
Anshuman Amitabh Tripathi (he/him) is from Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. Anshuman has completed his Undergraduate Degree in Ancient Indian Culture from Sathaye College in the year 2019 and Post Graduation in Archaeology from University of Mumbai in the year 2021. He is interested in Southeast Asian Studies. He enjoys reading about Southeast Asian history and culture and how it's connected with India in the form of Maritime History. He is proficient in Bahasa Indonesia (intermediate level) from KBRI-New Delhi. Anshuman currently works as an Archivist and Researcher intern at Siddhartha Das Studios New Delhi.
Htet Lwin
Mentor: Neda Shaban
Htet Lwin (she/her) recently finished her undergraduate studies with specializations in Women and Gender Studies and International Relations. Her undergraduate capstone project focused on gendered nationalism during the anti-colonial social movements of Burma. Her academic interests lie in feminist historiography with particular focuses on social uprisings, the ideology of dissent and protest, and gendered labor. She takes theoretical aspirations from materialist, abolitionist, and transnational feminisms in approaching her research questions. For Aruna’s research program, she is interested in understanding the history and evolution of the feminist movement(s) in Myanmar as a means to contribute to the global south transnational feminist scholarship and to see the local specificities of Myanmar’s feminism.
Kathryn Aung
Mentor: Chu May Paing
Kathryn Aung (she/her) is a graduate of the University of Tulsa, where she earned her B.A. in Political Science and English. Born in Yangon, Myanmar to Chinese and Chin parents, she is a member of the Burmese diaspora in the United States. Her honors research paper explores the online protest activity of the Burmese diaspora in the wake of the 2021 military coup and the construction of a diasporic public space on a digital platform. Her research interests include diaspora political mobilization, the infrastructure of social movements, and the experience of displacement and migration. She was a 2021-2022 Fellow at the Oklahoma Center for Humanities. She is a Tulsa Service Year Fellow of 2023-2024 at the Mayor’s Office of Resilience and Equity.
Loni Jones
Mentor: Kenzell Huggins
Loni Jones (she/her) is a recent graduate from the University of Colorado with a degree in Anthropology. She is curious about many things but most often questions how it is that individual identities are formed and reified within larger social and economic structures. Coming to university later in life after having raised a child, she especially wonders how beliefs about oneself are constructed and what this means in relation to belonging or not belonging in particular places or groups.