Role: Associate Professor, Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, Emory University

  Contact: rlal2@emory.edu

 Scholarship:
Modern History | Pre-Colonial Indian History | Feminist History & Theory

Ruby Lal is Professor of South Asian Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University, Atlanta. She holds an M.Phil in History from the University of Delhi, and a D.Phil from the University of Oxford, UK.  Before Emory, she taught at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, in History and Anthropology, and served as Associate Director of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality. Her fields of study include feminist history and theory, and the question of archive as it relates to writing about Islamic societies in the precolonial and colonial world. She is the author of Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2005), which won much acclaim, including more than fifteen reviews in major international journals and magazines, such as The New York Review of Books, The Economic and Political Weekly, Revue Historique, and The Times Literary Supplement. Her recent book entitled Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2013) has been reviewed extensively in academic journals and magazines with wider intellectual concerns. She is currently finalizing a narrative history of Mughal Empress Nur Jahan, entitled, Uncrowned Empress (W.W. Norton, 2017). Her published work is widely cited, and she is frequently invited to speak at academic and non-academic settings. Her short stories have appeared in Indian Literature and in The Little Magazine.  She is revising her short-story collection, Rubble and Other Stories.