Leela Gandhi, professor of English, University of Chicago
Professor Leela Gandhi received her D.Phil. from Balliol College, Oxford, and has been teaching at the University of Chicago since 2007. In 2006, she authored Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin de Siecle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Duke University Press), and in 1998, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (Columbia University Press). She also coauthored England Through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth-Century Fiction in 2001 (Palgrave Macmillan). She is the founding co-editor of The Journal of Postcolonial Studies and has published many articles, the latest being “The Pauper’s Gift: Postcolonial Studies and the New Democratic Dispensation” in Public Culture (2011) and “After Virtue: Notes on C20th Socialist Antimaterialism” in English Literary History (2010). Her research and teaching interests include 16th and 17th century drama, the culture of late-Victorian radicalism, Indo-Anglian literature, and postcolonial theory. Her current work pays close attention to the insistent allegiance between politics and ethics in anticolonial endeavors.
This lecture series honors Joseph M. Duffy (1924–88), who taught at the University of Notre Dame from 1954 to 1988; a great teacher scholar, he numbered among his students James Chandler and J. Dudley Andrew.
Sponsored by the Department of English