Leela Prasad is St. Purandar Das Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. (She was on Duke University’s faculty from 1999 to 2024). Her primary interests are the anthropology of ethics, with a focus on South Asia, gender, narrative, colonialism & decoloniality, prison-and post-prison life, and Gandhi. Her work is at the intersections of religious studies, anthropology, history and literature. She is co-directing a docu-fiction film set in 1944 about a young schoolteacher in rural India who sets out to fulfill an impossible dream: to meet Mahatma Gandhi.
Leela's Ph.D. (1998) is in Folklore & Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania, and her two M.A.s are in English from the University of Hyderabad (1988) and also from Kansas State University (1991). She has received fellowships and awards from the American Academy of Religion, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Philosophical Society. Between 2020 and 2022, she held Fulbright-Nehru senior fellowships and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2023-24.
In November 2022, Leela was elected Vice President of the American Academy of Religion. She is serving as President-Elect in 2023, and will become the AAR’s President in 2024.
Her book, Poetics of Conduct (Columbia University Press, 2007) won the American Academy of Religion’s prize for the “Best First Book in History of Religions.” Her second book, The Audacious Raconteur was published by Cornell University Press in 2020.
In her free time, Leela can be found playing with her dogs and/or searching for more dogs she can adopt.
