Shonaleeka Kaul is a cultural and intellectual historian of early India. She is Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, and has also been the Malathy Singh Distinguished Lecturer in South Asian Studies at Yale University, USA; the Jan Gonda Fellow in Indology at Leiden University, The Netherlands; and the DAAD Professor of History at Heidelberg University, Germany.

She has authored The Making of Early Kashmir: Landscape and Identity in the Rajatarangini (2018) and Imagining the Urban: Sanskrit and the City in Early India (2010), and edited Retelling Time: Alternative Temporalities from Premodern South Asia (2021), Eloquent Spaces: Meaning and Community in Early Indian Architecture (2019) and Cultural History of Early South Asia (2014). Translations by her include Hitopadesha (2022) and Looking Within: Life Lessons from Lal Ded, the Kashmiri Shaiva Mystic (2019).