Leela Prasad (Ph.D. Folklore & Folklife, University of Pennsylvania) joined Brown's Department of Religious Studies in 2024 after 25 years at Duke University. She 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 (Columbia, 2007) 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 by Cornell 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 is fluent in the Indian languages Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, and Hindi.
Apart from university teaching, Leela teaches graduate seminars on Gandhi in US prisons. She is also documenting the life-stories of Gandhi-inspired individuals in India who read Gandhi while serving prison terms. With her collaborator, Baba Prasad, she is co-directing a film called Let Us See on the lifelong resonance Gandhi on a schoolteacher who met him in 1944 when India was on the brink of freedom from colonial rule.
She 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.
Leela is President of the American Academy of Religion.
