Ruby Lal

Elected 2027 Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South at the Library of Congress, Ruby Lal is an award-winning historian of India and professor of South Asian history at Emory University. Her works restore erased female figures, their experiences and histories, particularly from the plural and itinerant Mughal Empire. She is the author of five critically acclaimed books. Her most recent book, Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan, was shortlisted for the James Tait Prize and won the Georgia Author of the Year award as finalist. Selected as one of the most anticipated non-fiction books by Ms. Magazine, and by History Today, Vagabond Princess was also longlisted for the Cundill History Prize, and has been lauded by the BBC, NPR, The Hindu, Times Literary Supplement, The Literary Magazine, The Vogue, The Wall Street Journal and numerous other national and international journals, magazines and newspapers in the USA, UK, Europe and India. A compendium to Vagabond Princess, The Diary of a Vagabond Princess: How a Victorian Translator Revived a Lost Classic will be published in Spring 2026 .

Ruby’s previous biography Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan, a Finalist in History for the LA Times Book Prize, also won the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Biography. Among the top ten pick of the Time Magazine, EMPRESS received extensive press in The Telegraph, the Prospect Magazine, New Yorker, Guardian, New York Times, BBC, and The Indian Express. EMPRESS has been optioned by Lionsgate. Ruby’s remix of Empress for young adults, Tiger Slayer was published in August 2025. Junior Library Guild of America selected this work as their Gold Standard 2025. The illustrations for this book are drawn Molly Crabapple, NY based artist and author. Tiger Slayer is shortlisted for the Atta Galata Bangalore Literature Festival Prize.

Ruby is as well the author of Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World AND Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness. These books received much attention in international journals and magazines, such as the New York Review of Books, The Economic and Political Weekly, Revue Historique, and Times Literary Supplement. She has received numerous fellowships, among them from the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (SCAS), Uppsala, Sweden, and as Public Humanities Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. And most recently as Distinguished International Fellow at the University of Bonn. She has written numerous essays and literary pieces in the USA, UK and India and speaks regularly at national and international venues, radio and podcasts, book clubs, literary festivals and ecumenical and literary retreats.