Conversations

ROM Book Club: Vagabond Princess, Ruby Lal

Los Angeles Times Finalist and Emory University Professor of South Asian Studies, Ruby Lal is the author, most recently, of Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan (Yale University Press, February 2024). Selected as one of the most anticipated 2024 non-fiction books by Ms. Magazine, and by History Today, Vagabond Princess has been lauded by the BBC, The Hindu, The Literary Magazine, The Vogue, The Wall Street Journal and numerous other national and international journals, magazines and newspapers in the USA, UK and India. 

 Ruby’s previous 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 LA Times Book Prize. Among the top ten pick of the Time Magazine, EMPRESS received extensive press in The Telegraph, the Prospect Magazine, The New Yorker, the Guardian, The New York Times, the BBC, and The Indian Express. 

Her remix of Empress for young adults, Tiger-Slayer is forthcoming in Spring 2025 (W. W. Norton, NY). 

Ruby is as well the author of Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World and Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness. These books won much acclaim in international journals and magazines, The New York Review of Books, The Economic and Political Weekly, Revue Historique, and The Times Literary Supplement. 

 Ruby has received numerous fellowships, among them from the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (SCAS), Uppsala, Sweden, and as Public Humanities Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. She has written numerous essays and literary pieces in the USA and India and speaks regularly at national and international conferences, on radio and podcasts, in book clubs, literary festivals and ecumenical and literary retreats.