Ruby Lal
Emory Professor and acclaimed historian of India, Ruby Lal is the author of three books and numerous essays, op-eds, and literary pieces. Both, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World AND Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness won much acclaim and reviews in major international journals and magazines, The New York Review of Books, The Economic and Political Weekly, Revue Historique, and The Times Literary Supplement. A New South Asia edition of Domesticity and Power will be published in November 2022.
Her recently published biography, Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan (NY: W. W. Norton, 2018, 2020) won the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Biography, and was a Finalist in History for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Among the top ten pick of the Time Magazine, The Telegraph and the Prospect Magazine London, EMPRESS has been lauded by The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New York Times, the BBC, The Indian Express, Business Standard and numerous other national and international journals, magazines and newspapers.
She is currently working on a remix of Empress for young adults. New York artist Molly Crabapple will illustrate this book, Tiger-Slayer (W. W. Norton, forthcoming)
Ruby has won numerous fellowships, among them at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (SCAS). She is currently the Visiting Public Humanities Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto where she is completing her new biography, REBEL PRINCESS: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan (Yale University Press). Sixteenth century nomadic Mughal Princess Gulbadan was the sole woman writer of the untold histories of bartered women, dead children, and peripatetic women embodying the adventure of life in war zones. Ruby brought Gulbadan’s memoir to the attention of the academic world in her first book and now turns to her biography.
Ruby speaks regularly at national and international conference, in book clubs, literary festivals and ecumenical and literary retreats. All her events are posted on this website.
