Namita Gupta and Adil Zahoor have been awarded 2026 Nicholson Fellowship to attend School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. In an intensive six-week course of study, participants work with a faculty of distinguished scholars in one of four six-week seminars. Each faculty member offers, in addition, a public lecture and a colloquium which are attended by the entire group. The program also includes mini-seminars and stand-alone lectures. The Unit’s fellowship covers the tuition and provides a housing stipend.
Namita is a PhD student in the Institute of Communications Research. Her dissertation examines how digital platforms and infrastructures in gated communities extend the governing logics of smart cities into everyday life. Rather than treating these technologies solely as sites of implementation, the project focuses on these technologies as sites of negotiation with the infrastructural logic(s). She shows how marginalized groups do not merely conform to, but also adapt to, challenge, or refuse these technologies to fit their needs and conveniences. As a Nicholson Fellow, she will attend the seminar titled Orientalism/Capitalism.
Adil is a Ph.D. student in Sociology whose research examines how militarized neoliberalisms produce and govern regimes of dispossession. To explore the intersection of these conceptual categories, he focuses on Pakistan’s militarized, dispossession-led neoliberal urban political economy, particularly since the re-establishment of formal democracy in 2008. He is also an Associate Editor at Folio Books, a Lahore-based independent publishing house. As a Nicholson Fellow, Adil will attend the seminar Orientalism/Capitalism.