Leela Prasad is a Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University whose primary interests are the anthropology of ethics, with a focus on South Asia, colonialism and decoloniality, prison pedagogy and Gandhi, as well as religion and modernity. Her work is at the intersections of religious studies, anthropology, history, and literature.

Leela's Ph.D. (1998) is in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania, and her two M.A.s are in English from the University of Hyderabad (1988), and also from Kansas State University (1991). She has received fellowships and awards from the American Academy of Religion, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Philosophical Society. In 2020, she held a Fulbright-Nehru senior fellowship, and held it again in 2021-2022. Her first book, Poetics of Conduct, won the American Academy of Religion’s prize for the “Best First Book in History of Religions.”

In her free time, Leela can be found playing with her dogs and/or searching for more dogs she can adopt.