Lisa Mitchell is Associate Professor of anthropology and history in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.  She is the author of Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (Indiana University Press, 2009 and Permanent Black, 2010), which was a recipient of the American Institute of Indian Studies' Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities; and Hailing the State: Collective Assembly and the Politics of Representation in the History of Indian Democracy (forthcoming, Duke University Press).

She is currently working on a new book project provisionally titled, Multiple Genealogies of Indian Democracy: Global Intellectual History in Translation.  Her research and teaching interests have included the rise and fall of language as a foundational category for the reorganization of literary production, history-writing, pedagogical practice, and assertions of socio-political identity in southern India; public space and collective forms of representation in the history and everyday practice of Indian democracy; the street and the railway station as public space; the city and the built environment in South Asia; and commodities in transnational history.  Mitchell has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright-Nehru program, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the European Research Council, and the American Institute for Indian Studies, and has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2014-2015), and a Mercator Visiting Fellow in Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität in Berlin (2018).  In 2020 she was a recipient of the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania.