Gauri Viswanathan (born November 5, 1950) is an

Indian American Indian Americans or Indo-Americans are citizens of the United States with ancestry from India. The United States Census Bureau uses the term Asian Indian to avoid confusion with Native Americans, who have also historically been referred to ...

academic. She is the Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities and Director of the South Asia Institute at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

Biography

Viswanathan was born on November 5, 1950, in

Kolkata Kolkata (, or , ; also known as Calcutta , the official name until 2001) is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River west of the border with Bangladesh. It is the primary business, comme ...

, the daughter of UN officials. She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from the

University of Delhi Delhi University (DU), formally the University of Delhi, is a collegiate central university located in New Delhi, India. It was founded in 1922 by an Act of the Central Legislative Assembly and is recognized as an Institute of Eminence (IoE) ...

and her doctorate from

. Her research has focused on nineteenth-century British and colonial cultural studies. She is the author of ''Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India'' (1989), which won the

James Russell Lowell Prize The James Russell Lowell Prize is an annual prize given to an outstanding scholarly book by the Modern Language Association. Background The prize is presented for a book that is an outstanding literary or linguistic study, a critical edition of ...

from the

Modern Language Association The Modern Language Association of America, often referred to as the Modern Language Association (MLA), is widely considered the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature. The MLA aims to "st ...

, and ''Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief'' (1998), which won the

Harry Levin Harry Tuchman Levin (July 18, 1912 – May 29, 1994) was an American literary critic and scholar of both modernism and comparative literature. Life and career Levin was born in Minneapolis, the son of Beatrice Hirshler (née Tuchman) and Isadore ...

Prize awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association. She also received a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

in 1990 and was a Mellon Fellow in 1986.

References

Living people Columbia University faculty Delhi University alumni Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni 1950 births Academics from Kolkata American academics of Indian descent {{US-academic-bio-stub