Kathryn Hansen is a cultural historian and has worked extensively on Indian theatre. She is the author of Stages of Life: Indian Theatre Autobiographies. Her Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India won the A.K. Coomaraswamy Book Prize. She translated and edited The Parsi Theatre: Its Origins and Development and co-edited A Wilderness of Possibilities: Urdu Studies in Transnational Perspective. Currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, she has earlier served as Director of Center for Asian Studies and as Program Officer for Translations at the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has also held teaching positions at the University of British Columbia, University of Chicago, and Rutgers University.