Leela Gandhi

Professor Leela Gandhi is the John Hawkes Professor of Humanities and English in the Literature faculty at Brown University, where she joined in 2014. She currently serves as the Shauna McKee Stark ’76 P’10 Director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women (2021–2024) and Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies. Previously, she was Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago (2007–2014), Tenured Senior Lecturer in the English Department at La Trobe University (1999–2007), and Tenured Lecturer at Hindu College, Delhi University (1991–1996). Gandhi holds a B.A. (Honours) in English from Delhi University (1986), an M.Phil. in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford (1989), and a D.Phil. in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford (1991). She has held visiting professorships in Australia, Denmark, India, Italy, and Iran.

A literary and cultural theorist, Gandhi's research and teaching center on transnational literatures, postcolonial theory and ethics, and the intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work examines overlapping legacies of colonial encounters, transnational anti-imperial ethics, the politics of friendship in anticolonial thought, and moral imperfection in democratic traditions. Key publications include Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (Columbia University Press, 1998; revised second edition, 2019), Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought and the Politics of Friendship (Duke University Press, 2006), The Common Cause: Postcolonial Ethics and the Practice of Democracy, 1900–1955 (University of Chicago Press, 2014), and England in Twentieth Century Fiction: Through Colonial Eyes (co-authored, Macmillan, 2001). She is the founding co-editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies and an editorial board member of Postcolonial Text. Honors include the Alfons Auer Ethics Prize of the University of Tübingen (2022), Senior Fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University (2012–), and fellowships from the Franke Institute for the Humanities and Australian Research Council grants.

Professional Email: Leela_Gandhi@brown.edu