Gauri Viswanathan

Viswanathan was born on 5 November 1950 in present-day Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal. Her parents were UN officials.^[2]

She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Delhi and her doctorate from Columbia University.^[1][2] Her research has focused on nineteenth-century British and colonial cultural studies.^[2]

She is the author of Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989), which won the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association,^[3] and Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (1998), which won the Harry Levin Prize awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association.^[2] She also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1990 and was a Mellon Fellow in 1986.^[4]