Kathryn Hansen is a cultural historian with a special interest in Indian theatre. Her most recent book, Stages of Life: Indian Theatre Autobiographies, presents the narratives of a quartet of artists in the Parsi theatre. It is centrally concerned with first-person narratives as a form of cultural memory. Her earlier book, Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India, won the A.K. Coomaraswamy Book Prize. She teaches in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.