Prestigious Beinecke Scholarship Awarded to Abhi Nimmagadda

June 13 :
The Beinecke Scholarship will allow Abhi Nimmagadda, a third-year student at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, to attend graduate school in South Asian Studies. As the tenth Northwestern scholarship recipient and the first since 2014, Nimmagadda is unique among Indian-Americans in receiving the $35,000 award.

The Nimmagadda family emigrated from Jackson, Mississippi, to Hyderabad, India, when Nimmagadda was three years old, and then back to Crown Point, Indiana, when he was ten years old. While he is proficient in a number of languages, Telugu is his mother tongue.

Nimmagadda is deep in research for her senior thesis at Northwestern University, which will examine the literary achievements of Telugu-Americans through the lenses of race and caste. In addition, he was a co-founder of the South Asian identity and politics club Jasmine Collective.

Language in South Asia is a window into social stratification, area, and caste. The Beinecke Scholarship will allow Nimmagadda to continue studying the logics of racial and caste discrimination, according to him.

Discrimination based on caste is frequently disregarded by American society. Nimmagada expressed her hope that her research could provide credence to anti-caste movements globally.

American culture is unable to comprehend unlawful acts and prejudice via a caste lens. Race is a factor, but it's not always easy to detect. He continued by saying that he hoped to make a contribution to anti-caste movements around the world with research that could withstand scholarly evaluation.

The Office of Fellowships' associate director for outreach and communications, Jason Kelly Roberts, said that Abhi personifies the public humanities by relating his academic work to real-world issues. In 1971, in recognition of Edwin, Frederick, and Walter Beinecke, the Board of Directors of The Sperry and Hutchinson Company created the Beinecke Scholarship Programme. For exceptionally talented young people, the programme offers large scholarships to help defray the cost of graduate school in the social sciences, arts, and humanities.