Karen Isaksen Leonard
Department of Anthropology - University of
California, Irvine
Karen Isaksen Leonard is an historian and anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine. With a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin (1969) on the history of India, she has published on the social history and anthropology of India and also on Punjabi Mexican Americans, South Asian Americans, and Muslim Americans. She has an unpublished manuscript - available here - on the mountain climbing sections of the southern California Sierra Club.
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Recent Projects
Locating
Home: India's Hyderabadis Abroad - Stanford University Press (2007), Oxford University Press, India (2008). This most recent book is on the construction of identity in the diaspora by emigrants from Hyderabad, India, and involved almost fifteen years of research and writing. It is a multisite ethnography based on research in Pakistan, Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia, and the Gulf states of the Middle East.
Muslims in the United States: the State of Research - New York: Russell Sage Foundation (2003). This book is an extended bibliographic essay relating Muslim Americans to the changing religious, social and political landscape in America.
Leonard is currently embarked on a collaborative project with a colleague in Art History, Alka Patel, looking at the social history of important banking family firms to the Nizams in Hyderabad. The special contribution comes from focusing on the buildings constructed by these Gujarati, Goswami, and Marwari entrepreneurs in Hyderabad and also back in their homelands in Gujarat, Rajasthan, and northern and central India. She is also working to update her work on Indian and Pakistani entrepreneurs in Central Asia after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.
Earlier Books
- Social History of an Indian Caste: the Kayasths of Hyderabad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
- Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi Mexican Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).
- South Asian Americans (Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press, The New Americans series, 1997).
Edited Books and Journal issues
- Karen Isaksen Leonard, "Young American Muslims: Multiple Identities," issue of Muslim World 95:4 (October 2005).
- Karen Isaksen Leonard, with co-editors Alex Stepick, Manuel Vasquez, and Jennifer Holdaway, Immigrant Faiths: Transforming Religious Life in America (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2005).
- Karen Isaksen Leonard, with co-editors Ann Gold and Gayatri Reddy. Histories of Intimacy and Situated Ethnography (Delhi, India: Manohar books, 2010).
Contact
Karen Leonard (academic
home page) can be reached by email at kbleonar@uci.edu or by regular mail c/o Department of Anthropology, School of Social Sciences, 3151 Social Science Plaza, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California 92697-5100.