Leela Gandhi’s scholarly work is driven by an impulse toward disciplinary intersection and an interest in the overlapping and intertwining legacies borne of colonial encounters, especially transnational traditions of anti-imperial ethics. Her first book Postcolonial Theory (1998) maps shifts in critical theory and philosophy produced by the encounter between the west and non-west. In Affective Communities (2006), she examines the role of friendship between western and non-western dissidents in the formation of anticolonial politics. Her recently published The Common Cause: Postcolonial Ethics and the Practice of Democracy, 1900-1955 (2014) is about the concept of moral imperfection that lies behind many global and countercultural traditions of democracy. She is currently working on the notion of ‘likeness’ as a lost conceit in ethical thought.

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Senior Fellow, School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University

Sawyer-Mellon Grant (with three others) for yearlong seminar ‘Around 1948’, at the University of Chicago

Sawyer-Mellon Fellow, Centre for Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Chicago

Fellow, Franke Institute for the Humanities

Fellow, Committee on the Chicago Centre for Contemporary Theory, University of Chicago

Australian Research Council Grant

Sir Louis Stewart Bequest Grant, Balliol College

Charles Wallace India Trust Grant

Inlaks Foundation Scholarship for postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford

Modern Language Association

School of Criticism and Theory

Adishakti Laboratory for Performing Arts

Leela Gandhi teaches courses at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences on Anglophone Literature, transnational literary and critical theory, radical ethics, and postcolonial theory.