Leela Prasad

Leela Prasad, St. Purandar Das Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University, is interested in the anthropology of ethics, human rights and social justice, gender, diasporic life, storytelling and performance, colonialism & decoloniality, prison and post-prison life, and Gandhi.

She enjoys putting early Indic literary and religious thought into conversation with contemporary practices of everyday life. Her first book, Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town won the American Academy of Religion’s prize for the “Best First Book in History of Religions.” She has several publications on gender and performance, including the co-edited Gender and Story in South India, which highlights the power and poignancy of a female-oriented poetics. Leela’s second monograph, The Audacious Raconteur: Sovereignty and Storytelling in Colonial India, was published in 2020. She guest-curated the first exhibition on Indian American life in 1999 called Live Like the Banyan Tree: Images of the Indian American Experience held at the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia, now Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Accompanying the catalogue for this exhibition, she co-directed with Uma Magal a documentary film titled Back and Forth: Two Generations of Indian Americans at Home. Co-directed with Uma Magal.

Leela, who is fluent in the Indian languages Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, and Hindi, has received grants from the American Academy of Religion, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society. She held Fulbright-Nehru senior fellowships in 2020 and 2022, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023-2024. In addition, she teaches graduate seminars on Gandhi in US prisons.