Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Center for Contemporary South Asia

Leela Gandhi to Serve as Associate Director of CCSA

September 5, 2016

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Leela Gandhi, John Hawkes Professor of the Humanities and English, will be the associate director of the Center for Contemporary South Asia (CCSA).   She will direct the Center’s student programs and also imagine, with us, creative conversations between the Humanities and the Social Sciences.   For the last two years, Leela was associated with the Brown-India Initiative as member of the Steering Committee.  In that role, she helped us collectively craft a new vision for the CCSA.

Leela came to Brown in 2014 after serving on the faculty of the University of Chicago for many years.  Her scholarship is driven by an interest in the transnational ethical legacies of colonial encounters.  Her books include Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (Columbia University Press, 1998), Affective Communities: Anti-Colonial Thought and the Politics of Friendship (Duke University Press, 2006), and, most recently, The Common Cause: Postcolonial Ethics and the Practice of Democracy, 1900-1955 (University of Chicago Press, 2014).  

Leela has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Delhi and a doctorate from Oxford University.   In addition to being a leading literary theorist, she is also a poet.  Measures of Home (2000) is a collection of her poems.

Please welcome Leela as our associate director!

Ashutosh Varshney
Director