Fellowships & Grants

Senior Fellowship Program

The Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies (ANHS) annually awards senior fellowships for support of short-term research or other scholarly projects that will advance knowledge of the Himalaya-Karakoram-Hindukush mountain regions. The fellowship will support work focusing on any aspect of Himalayan studies. Read the Senior Fellowship Guidelines.

2013 Senior Fellowship Award

Deadline for submission: April 1, 2013.

The 2013 ANHS Senior Fellowship Program announcement is forthcoming.

2012 Senior Fellowship Award

This is the third year of the ANHS Senior Fellowship Program and we received numerous excellent applications. Through this program, the ANHS Executive Council sustains the mission of ANHS and serves the research interests of our members.

The ANHS Senior Fellowship Program supports projects that will advance knowledge about the greater Himalayan region. The award for 2012 is:

Dr. Anna Marie Stirr, Assistant Professor of Asian Studies, University of Hawai'i at Manoa
Project Title: Songs of Love and Revolution: Dreams of Social Transformation in Nepali Communist Songs

Abstract: This project is a social history and ethnography of Nepali communist musical production. Its theoretical focus lies on the mutability and interrelatedness of concepts of public and private, and the identifications and tensions between the intimate and the political, contending that music mediates these relationships in unique ways. Through a study of musical production across Nepal's various communist parties (1960-present), I approach ideas of communism, love, and development as interrelated modes of aspiration, or ways of orienting self and society toward an imagined, better, future. I examine how individuals associated with different political parties and perspectives use song not only to express ideals but also to shape their social worlds. Asking how different strands of Nepali communist thought shape ways of imagining a transformative politics of love, I center my analysis on the role song plays in creating the intersubjective spaces for such imaginings.

2011 Senior Fellowship Award

This is the second year of the ANHS Senior Fellowship Program and we received numerous excellent applications. Through this program, the ANHS Executive Council sustains the mission of ANHS and serves the research interests of our members.

The ANHS Senior Fellowship Program supports projects that will advance knowledge about the greater Himalayan region. The award for 2011 is:

Dr. Amanda Snellinger, Affiliate Scholar, The Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington
Project Title: Transfiguration of the Political: From Student Activist to Politician in "New Nepal"

Abstract: This project examines how Nepali political actors discursively negotiate international political values within their own political context. I will pursue research on Nepal's ongoing constituent assembly and the role that the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) has played in restructuring the Nepali state. Focusing on the issue of consensus, and the negotiations over secularism and ethnic and gender inclusion, I ask how this interaction is shaping a generation of politicians and the future of a nation-state. This project builds on previous research, in which I analyzed the local and international factors that have shaped a generation of Nepali student activists as they deposed the Hindu monarchy and ushered in Nepal's democratic republic or, as they call it, "new Nepal." A number of my key informants have progressed from student activism to the constituent assembly, serving in both elected and party-appointed seats. Analyzing their experiences on the constituent assembly will bring my research full circle as I switch my focus from the influence that party leaders and international actors have had on student activists' developing political identity to the negotiation these student activists engage in with their party leaders and international actors in the constituent assembly process.

2010 Senior Fellowship Awards

2010 was the first year of the ANHS Senior Fellowship Program and we received several excellent applications. In order to highlight our broader mission and to better serve the research interests of our members, the ANHS Executive Council awarded two fellowships: one for Nepal and one for the high mountain regions of Asia outside Nepal.

ANHS hopes this award marks the beginning of a vital fellowship program to support projects that will advance knowledge about the greater Himalayan region. The awards for 2010 are:

Dr. Birendra Raj Giri, FELS/ChDL, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
Project Title: Bonded Labour Practice in Nepal

Dr. Sarah J. Halvorson, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Geography, University of Montana
Project Title: Community Vulnerability and Response to Glacial Retreat, Bhutan

Dor Bahadur Bista Prize

Dor Bahadur Bista's Photograph ANHS annually awards the Dor Bahadur Bista Prize for best graduate student paper submitted to this ANHS competition. The prize honors the life, career, and service of Dor Bahadur Bista, Nepal’s first anthropologist and former Honorary President of the ANHS predecessor organization, the Nepal Studies Association.

The purpose of the prize is to recognize outstanding scholarship by students whose research focuses on the areas of High Asia (Hindu Kush – Karakoram – Himalaya – Tibetan Plateau) that comprise the principal interests of ANHS.

Submissions from all academic disciplines in the social sciences, humanities, and arts will be accepted. Read how to apply for the 2012 Dor Bahadur Bista Prize.

2012 Dor Bahadur Bista Prize

Deadline for submission: September 15, 2012.

2011 Dor Bahadur Bista Prize Winner

Sarah Besky, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Paper Title: Moral Economies of Land, Labor, and Justice on Darjeeling Tea Plantations

Abstract: This article explores how tea plantation laborers in Darjeeling, India understood their place in the circulation of an environmental commodity - fair trade and organic Darjeeling tea - and confronted the alienation of land, labor, and product. Moving beyond economically rooted theories of empowerment, I explore how, in an era in which environmental commodities are increasingly seen as material vehicles for social change, the universal concept of justice is made "practically effective" when people engage it in particular, place-based histories of cultural and economic encounter (Tsing 2005:8). I draw upon environmental history, linguistic and kinship analysis, and gendered narratives of identity to understand how workers in Darjeeling localized the universal concept of "justice" to comment on the conditions of life and tea production. Workers used "justice" to position themselves in postcolonial national and regional politics as well as a global environmental commodity chain. "Justice" grappled with tea's place among Darjeeling's "imperial ruins" (Stoler 2008), in which Nepali workers saw the remnants of a stable moral economy and productive tea industry. Workers believed that they could revitalize these ruins, not with organic certification schemes or fair trade premiums, but through the formation of a separate Indian state of Gorkhaland.

2010 Dor Bahadur Bista Prize Winner

Tejendra Pherali, Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom
Paper Title: Leadership in Peril: Managing School and Self during Nepal’s ‘People’s War’

Travel Grants

ANHS provides cost-sharing travel grants at its discretion for visiting scholars to attend ANHS-supported panels and/or conferences.

2011 Travel Grants

ANHS provided travel grants to an invited speaker and three Tribhuvan University faculty to attend the First ANHS Himalayan Studies Conference at Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota, October 28-30, 2011: Dr. Drona Rasali, Chronic Disease Epidemiologist, Government of Saskatchewan, Canada; Dr. Om Gurung, Professor and Department Head, Central Department of Sociology/Anthropology, Tribhuvan University; Dr. Dilli Ram Dahal, Professor of Anthropology, Center for Nepal and Asian Studies, Tribhuvan University; and Dr. Laya Prasad Uprety, Associate Professor in Anthropology, Central Department of Sociology/Anthropology, Tribhuvan University.

ANHS provided a travel grant to Dr. Hari P. Dhungana of the Southasia Institute of Advanced Studies in Kathmandu to attend the Nature Inc. conference at The Hague, June 29 to July 2, 2011.

2010 Travel Grants

ANHS provided travel grants to Krishna Bhattachan and Ram Chhetri of Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu to attend the Annual Conference on South Asia at Madison, Wisconsin, October 14 to 17, 2010.

Design and coding: Milan Shrestha