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Leela Prasad

Professor of Religious Studies
Religious Studies
Box 90964, 118C Gray Bldg, Durham, NC 27708
118C Gray Bldg, Durham, NC 27708
Office hours on leave, 2023-24  

Overview


Leela Prasad's primary interests are the anthropology of ethics, with a focus on South Asia, Hindu worlds, gender, colonialism & decoloniality, prison pedagogy & Gandhi, and religion & modernity. Her work is at the intersections of religious studies, anthropology, history and literature.   

Her book Poetics of Conduct: Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town (Columbia University Press, 2007) explores how ethical discourses and self-formation can be understood through a study of oral narrative, performance, gendered knowledge, vernacular material practices ranging from architecture to foodways, and the poetics of everyday language. This book was awarded the “Best First Book in the History of Religions Prize” by the American Academy of Religion.

Leela’s second book titled The Audacious Raconteur: Sovereignty and Storytelling in Colonial India (Cornell University Press, 2020) builds an archive from the unofficial anthropology and literary writings of three little-known Indian scholars in late colonial India, and from the recorded oral narrations of a Goan Christian ayah. Through a close study of these narrators, who constitute the figure of the “audacious raconteur,” the book argues that audacious raconteurs wrested back concepts of religion, culture and history through experiential understandings of those concepts—and accomplished this re-appropriation using the very language, genres, and Enlightenment paradigms of the West. As such, the audacious raconteur was a political subject whose sovereignty in the realm of creativity displays the unreachability of the colonial knowledge-project. The book benefited from a surprising turn with the discovery of descendants of the writers. Conversations with families help us see why the audacious raconteur continues to be an ethical figure necessary in modern life. 

A key area of Leela's interest is documentary film and televisual media. She is currently co-directing an ethnographic documentary film called Moved by Gandhi, a film that explores the poetry of ethical resonance. In her other project, she examines how the concept of entanglement drives the ethical imaginary of a televisual publics in modern India. In this documentary vein, Leela guest-curated the first exhibition on Indian American life called Live Like the Banyan Tree, on display during 1999-2000 at The Balch Institute (now the Historical Society of Pennsylvania) and co-directed an accompanying film titled Back and Forth.

Leela's next book project has emerged from her film on Gandhian resonance, and from her experience teaching semester-long courses on Gandhi in the state and federal prison systems in North Carolina. This new ethnographic project, called Being Human at the Margin hopes to understand how ex-prisoners who have been exposed to Gandhi’s writings during their prison terms re-figure Gandhian influences in their post-prison lives. She has been awarded a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Fellowship for this research project. 

She has published in journals such as NumenJournal of Religious EthicsJournal of the American Academy of ReligionOral TraditionJournal of South Asian History and Culture, and in various edited volumes. 

Leela is fluent in the Indian languages of Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, and Hindi. She was the inaugural faculty director for the Duke Center for Civic Engagement, and has served on the Board of the Center for Documentary Studies for many years, the steering committee of the university-wide Mellon-funded transformative humanities initiative at Duke called Humanities Writ Large, the Executive Committee of the Graduate Faculty, and on the American Academy of Religion's Board of Directors.

She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Religion and the Fulbright program. 

She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023.

In 2019, Leela was awarded the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring by Duke's Graduate School. She is Vice-President of the American Academy of Religion, and will serve as its President in 2024-25.


Current Appointments & Affiliations


Professor of Religious Studies · 2020 - Present Religious Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Professor in the Program of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies · 2021 - Present Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

Education, Training & Certifications


University of Pennsylvania · 1998 Ph.D.