Rate My Professor Leela Gandhi

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.