Paula Richman is a Professor of South Asian Religions at Oberlin College. She specializes in the study of the Ramayana and Tamil language and is also the editor of books like Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia and Questioning Ramayanas: A South Asian Tradition. Many Ramayanas focuses on characters generally seen as stigmatized or marginalized, and on themes largely overlooked in previous scholarship related to the epic. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship and several grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Institute of India Studies.