The Department of English 2011-12 Annual Joseph M. Duffy Lecture
Leela Gandhi
Professor of English
University of Chicago
Notes on Democracy as a Spiritual Exercise
October 3, 2011
4:30 pm
Eck Center Auditorium
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 coauthored England Through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth-Century Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). 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," Public Culture (2011) and "After Virtue: Notes on C20th Socialist Antimaterialism," English Literary History (2010). Her research and teaching interests include sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama, the culture of late-Victorian radicalism, Indo-Anglian literature, and Postcolonial theory. Her current work pays closer attention to the insistent allegiance between ‘politics’ and ‘ethics’ in anticolonial endeavour.
This lecture series honors Joseph M. Duffy (1924-1988), 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, among others.
The Annual Joseph M. Duffy Lecture was founded in 1993 and has since been honored to host the following presenters: Frank Lentricchia (Duke University); Coppelia Kahn (Brown University); Stephen Greenblatt (University of California, Berkely); Mary Poovey (The Johns-Hopkins University); Seamus Heaney (Nobel Prize Laureate); Njabulo S Ndebele (Congress of South African Writers, president. University of the North in Sovenga, South Africa, vice-chancellor); Arnold Rampersad (Stanford University); Theodious Davis (Vanderbuilt); Nancy Armstrong (Brown University); Jean-Michael Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania); James Chandler (University of Chicago); from “Textsounds: a mini-conference”: Marjorie Perloff (Stanford University, Emerita), Joan Retallack (Bard College), Steve McCafferey (SUNY, Buffalo), chris cheek (University of Miami, Ohio), Charles Bernstein (University of Pennsylvania), and Caroline Bergvall (Temple University); Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania); Lawrence Lipking (Northwestern University); Michael Heller (formerly at NYU) and Hank Lazer (University of Alabama); John Guillory (NYU); David Marriott (UC, Santa Cruz); Daniel Tiffany (USC); and now Leela Gandhi (University of Chicago).