Shonaleeka Kaul is India’s leading cultural historian, specializing in Sanskrit literature. She is Professor, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and has also been the Malathy Singh Distinguished Lecturer in South Asian Studies, Yale University
(USA), Jan Gonda Fellow in Indology, Leiden University (The Netherlands), and Visiting Professor, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University (Germany). A prolific and path- breaking author, she has published nine internationally acclaimed books, each
demolishing colonial fallacies about India and putting out a rigorous and compelling new understanding of it. These include Imagining the Urban: Sanskrit and the City in Early India (2010), The Making of Early Kashmir: Landscape and Identity in the Rajatarangini (2018), Myths and Places: New Perspectives in Indian Cultural Geography (2023) and Bharata Before the British and Other Essays: Towards a New Indology (2024). She has been invited to speak widely around India and the world including at Sorbonne (Paris), Sapienza (Rome), Stanford and Michigan (USA), Freie University (Berlin), Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), World Sanskrit Conference (Bangkok and Canberra), and the United Nations (Geneva).