Professor, Anthropology
School of Social Sciences

Asian American Studies
School of Humanities

Social history of India, caste, ethnicity and gender, Asian-Americans in the United States

Dr. Leonard's interests are interdisciplinary and comparative, ranging from the socio-economic history and anthropology of South Asia to Asian American Studies. Leonard's book, Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi Mexican Americans, looks at the Punjabi immigrants who came to rural California in the early twentieth century and particularly at the families they formed with Hispanic women to explore transformations of ethnic identity in the United States. Her book, South Asian Americans, looks at Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Afghan, and Nepalese immigrants. Currently, Leonard is working on personal and national identities in the diaspora of Hyderabadi emigrants from India after 1948, a cross-national comparative project being carried out in Hyderabad, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Australia, and the Gulf States of the Middle East. She has also completed a bibliographic essay on Muslims in the U.S., her most recent book, and is working on American Muslims and their place in America's changing religious landscape.

Locating Home: India's Hyderabadis Abroad (Stanford University Press, 2007).

Social History of an Indian Caste: the Kayasths of Hyderabad. lst ed. U of California Press, Berkeley, 1978; 2nd ed. Orient Longman, Hyderabad, India, 1993.

Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi-Mexican-Americans. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.

The South Asian Americans. Greenwood Press, New Americans series, Westport, Conn., 1997.

Muslims in the United States: The State of Research. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003

Co-Director,
Center for Asian Studies, 2004—2007

Center for Asian Studies

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=2599

Last updated
10/08/2006