Photo credits:
Danish Saroee

Ruby Lal

Fellow, SCAS.
Professor of South Asian History, Emory University, Atlanta


Ruby Lal is Professor of South Asian History at Emory University, Atlanta. She taught previously
at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Her fields of study include feminist history and theory,
and the question of archive as it relates to writing about Islamic societies in the early modern and
modern world. Author of numerous articles and essays for a wider audience, her first book, 
Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World
 (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2005),
won much acclaim, including numerous reviews in major international journals and magazines, such
as The New York Review of BooksThe Economic and Political WeeklyRevue Historique, and The
Times Literary Supplement
. Her second book, Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl-
Child and the Art of Playfulness
(Cambridge University Press, New York, 2013), was reviewed
extensively in academic journals and magazines dealing with broader intellectual concerns. Her recently
published biography, Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan (W.W. Norton, New York, 2018),
was lauded internationally and was a finalist in History for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won
the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Biography.

While at SCAS, she will be completing her new biography – REBEL PRINCESS: The Great Adventures
of Gulbadan
(Yale University Press) – of the sixteenth century nomadic Mughal Princess Gulbadan,
the sole woman prose chronicler of the untold histories of bartered women, dead children, and peripatetic
women embodying the adventure of life in war zones. A key lens for thinking this biography is the question
of archive and migration in the early modern Indian Ocean world. 


This information is accurate as of the academic year 2020-21.