Leela Prasad

Leela Prasad is an Indian historian based in the United States. A scholar of Indian history and the anthropology of ethics, she is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and is St. Purandar Das Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University.

Biography She obtained her BA at Osmania University in 1986, her MAs at University of Hyderabad in 1988 and at Kansas State University in 1991, and her PhD in Folklore and Folklife at University of Pennsylvania in 1998; In 1999, she started working at Duke University as Assistant Professor of Religion at the Department of Religious Studies, and he was an Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor from 2002 to 2003. She became an associate professor in 2007, In 2006, she worked on two books: as co-editor of Gender and Story in South India and as author of Poetics of Conduct, for which she won the 2007 American Academy of Religion Best First Book in the History of Religions Award. In 2020, she released another book, The Audacious Raconteur. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023. She served as vice president of the American Academy of Religion in 2023 and will become president in 2024, as well as the fourth Asian-American woman in the position. As of 2024, she and Baba Prasad are working as co-directors of Let Us See, a docufiction film on Mahatma Gandhi's 1944 interactions with a schoolteacher. Gender and Story in South India (2006) Poetics of Conduct (2006) The Audacious Raconteur (2020)