Towson University’s Harjant Gill, a professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice, has been selected as a Fulbright U.S. scholar for 2026–27, winning the Fulbright-Nehru Research Award.

Gill will travel to India to continue his research on how social structures—patriarchy, caste, nationalism and state violence—become embedded in everyday surroundings there.

“I have been incredibly fortunate to have a wonderfully supportive group of colleagues in my department who continue to offer wisdom, encouragement and intellectual community,” Gill says. “I am especially grateful to College of Liberal Arts Dean Chris Chulos and department chair Jennifer Langdon. They have been tremendous champions of my scholarship and have gone out of their way to support my research and creative work. 

“Towson University has given me the space to develop an ambitious body of work that brings together anthropology, filmmaking and public scholarship.” 

Gill is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, whose work explores masculinity, migration, media, religion and popular culture in South Asia and its diasporas. 

His work has been broadcast on the BBC, PBS and India’s Doordarshan. His films have also been screened widely at universities, film festivals and public forums around the world. 

The Fulbright research award will give me the time, institutional support and intellectual community needed to study these transformations closely.

Harjant Gill

The Fulbright award will allow him to continue work on his new project, “The Look of Safety,” which will examine how surveillance and security infrastructures produce unequal experiences of citizenship in Delhi.

Beginning in 2027, Gill will conduct ethnographic research across neighborhoods and public spaces throughout Delhi. He plans to interview residents, private security guards, domestic and service-sector workers, students, activists, journalists and scholars.

Gill also plans to create a publicly accessible, interactive documentary combining video testimony, photography, sound and layered maps to help viewers move among neighborhoods and compare how different people experience the city.

“This new project feels especially urgent because surveillance and security have become increasingly woven into everyday life,” Gill explains. “I am interested in a paradox: Even as the state retreats from welfare and delegates many responsibilities to the private sector, it becomes more present through policing, surveillance, militarization and the regulation of dissent.

“The Fulbright research award will give me the time, institutional support and intellectual community needed to study these transformations closely.”  

A second Fulbright 

Gill won the Fulbright-Nehru Research Award in 2019, but the fellowship was suspended a few months into his work due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Harjant Gill, TU professor of Anthropology holding his book “Coming of Age in Macholand: Masculinity, Patriarchy, and the Search for Freedom in Indian Punjab,”

But he was still able to complete crucial research for his book, “Coming of Age in Macholand: Masculinity, Patriarchy, and the Search for Freedom in Indian Punjab,” which publishes this November.

Based on a decade of fieldwork and interviews, “Coming of Age in Macholand,” chronicles the experiences of queer and straight Indian Punjabi men as they navigate caste, family obligations, arranged marriage, migration, sexuality, friendship and heartbreak. 

The book examines patriarchy not only as a system that gives men power over women and sexual minorities but also as one that constrains men’s emotional and intimate lives.

“This is a deeply personal book—part memoir, part ethnography and part documentary storytelling,” Gill says. “It grew from my own experiences of growing up in India and later returning as an anthropologist and a filmmaker. Over many years, I became interested in the contradictory position men occupy within patriarchy: Men often benefit from gender and caste hierarchies, but their lives are also constrained by the expectations attached to manhood.” 

Efforts are already underway to release the book in India in early 2027. Gill is also working with translators on Punjabi and Hindi editions, so that people who do not read English—including many of the people whose experiences informed the book—can engage with it.” 

TU and the Fulbright

Gill will be the 41st TU professor named a Fulbright U.S. scholar since 1957. TU was named a Fulbright Top Producing Institution in 2023 and 2024.

The Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, is one of the nation’s most prestigious international exchange programs, supporting faculty and professionals as they engage in research and teaching abroad to foster mutual understanding between nations. Since 1946, it has provided more than 400,000 talented and accomplished students, scholars, teachers, artists and professionals of all backgrounds with the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research abroad.

For more information about the Fulbright Program, visit https://fulbrightprogram.org/.