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.[1]
Leela Prasad | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Historian |
| Awards | Guggenheim Fellowship (2023) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | |
| Thesis | Scripture and strategy: narrative and the poetics of appropriate conduct in Śṛingeri, South India (1998) |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | History |
| Sub-discipline |
|
| Institutions | |
Biography
editShe 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;[1] her doctoral dissertation was Scripture and strategy: narrative and the poetics of appropriate conduct in Śṛingeri, South India.[2] 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.[3] She became an associate professor in 2007,[3] and In 2020, she became a full professor.[4] She also held an associate professorship at Duke's Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from 2013 to 2015.[3] In 2024, she moved from Duke to the Brown University Department of Religious Studies.[1]
As an academic, Prasad specialises in the anthropology of ethics, early Indic philology, history of India, and oral history.[1] She curated a Historical Society of Pennsylvania exhibition on the history of the South Asian Americans in the Delaware Valley, and she subsequently edited a tie-in 1999 volume Live Like the Banyan Tree.[5] In 2006, she worked on two books: as co-editor of Gender and Story in South India and as author of Poetics of Conduct,[6][7] for which she won the 2007 American Academy of Religion Best First Book in the History of Religions Award.[8] In 2020, she released another book, The Audacious Raconteur.[9] She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023.[10] 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.[4] 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.[1]
She is fluent in Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, and Telegu.[1]
Bibliography
editReferences
edit- ^ a b c d e f "Prasad, Leela". vivo.brown.edu. Retrieved 14 November 2024.
- ^ Prasad, Leela (1998). Scripture and strategy : narrative and the poetics of appropriate conduct in Śṛingeri, South India (PhD thesis). University of Pennsylvania. OCLC 187470803.
- ^ a b c "Leela Prasad". Scholars@Duke. Archived from the original on 17 June 2023. Retrieved 14 November 2024.
- ^ a b "Leela Prasad Selected to Lead the American Academy of Religion". Women In Academia Report. 21 December 2022. Retrieved 14 November 2024.
- ^ "Live Like the Banyan Tree | Religious Studies". religiousstudies.duke.edu. Retrieved 14 November 2024.
- ^ "Gender and Story in South India". SUNY Press. Retrieved 14 November 2024.
- ^ "Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town". Columbia University Press. Columbia University Press. Retrieved 14 November 2024.
- ^ "Past and Current Winners - AAR Book Awards". aarweb.org. Retrieved 14 November 2024.
- ^ "The Audacious Raconteur by Leela Prasad | Paperback". Cornell University Press. Retrieved 14 November 2024.
- ^ "Leela Prasad". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved 13 November 2024.
- ^ Korom, Frank J. (2001). "Review of Live like the Banyan Tree: Images of the Indian American Experience". The Journal of American Folklore. 114 (451): 70–73. doi:10.2307/3592380. ISSN 0021-8715 – via JSTOR.
- ^ Davis, Coralynn V. (2007). "Review of Gender and Story in South India". Asian Folklore Studies. 66 (1/2): 279–282. ISSN 0385-2342 – via JSTOR.
- ^ Clark‐Decès, Isabelle (2009). "Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town". History of Religions. 48 (3): 259–260. doi:10.1086/598237. ISSN 0018-2710 – via University of Chicago Press.
- ^ Davis, Donald R. (2008). "Review of Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 128 (4): 812–813. ISSN 0003-0279 – via JSTOR.
- ^ Herzfeld, Michael (2008). "Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town". The Journal of Asian Studies. 67 (03). doi:10.1017/S0021911808001599. ISSN 0021-9118 – via Duke University Press.
- ^ Tannenbaum, Nicola (2009). "Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town by Leela Prasad". American Ethnologist. 36 (4): 806–807. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01211_7.x. ISSN 0094-0496 – via Wiley Online Library.
- ^ Lutgendorf, Philip (20 March 2023). "Review of The Audacious Raconteur: Sovereignty and Storytelling in Colonial India". JAOS. 143 (1): 230–233. doi:10.7817/jaos.143.1.2023.r0006. ISSN 2169-2289 – via Lockwood Online Journals.