Pembroke Center

Leela Gandhi is on sabbatical in 2023-24.

Leela Gandhi is a literary and cultural theorist whose research and teaching focus on transnational literatures, postcolonial theory and ethics, and the intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gandhi joined the Brown faculty in 2014 as the John Hawkes Professor of Humanities and English, and in addition to directing the Pembroke Center, she is a member of the Steering Committee for the Center for Contemporary Southeast Asia. She also is a Senior Fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. Gandhi received her B.A. from the University of Delhi, her M.Phil. and D.Phil. from Oxford University, and before coming to Brown she taught at the University of Chicago, Delhi University, and La Trobe University. A founding co-editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies and editorial board member of Postcolonial Text, Gandhi is the author of the books Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Politics, History, and Culture), Postcolonial Theory: A critical introduction, The Common Cause: Postcolonial Ethics and the Practice of Democracy, 1900-1955, and the poetry collection Measures of Home.