DR GAURI VISWANATHAN

PROFESSOR OF HUMANITIES, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

 

Gauri Viswanathan is Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She has published widely on education, religion and culture; nineteenth-century British and colonial cultural studies; and the history of modern disciplines. She is the author of Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (Columbia, 1989; 25th anniversary edition with a new preface, 2014) and Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Princeton, 1998), which won the Harry Levin Prize awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association, the James Russell Lowell Prize awarded by the Modern Language Association, and the Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Prize awarded by the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the editor of Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (Vintage, 2001), and of a special issue of ARIEL on “Institutionalizing English Studies: The Postcolonial/Postindependence Challenge” (2000). Prof. Viswanathan is coeditor of the book series South Asia Across the Disciplines, published jointly by the university presses of Columbia, Chicago, and California under a Mellon grant. She has held numerous visiting chairs, among them the Beckman Professorship at Berkeley, and was recently an Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and a Visiting Mellon Scholar at the University of Cape Town. She has received Guggenheim, NEH, and Mellon fellowships, and was a fellow at various international research institutes. Prof. Viswanathan’s current work is on genealogies of secularism and the writing of alternative religious histories. She has published extensively on the cultural influence of Theosophy, with two recent articles appearing in PMLA. She is a network partner in the international research project "Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy, Modernism, and the Arts," funded by the Leverhulme Trust in the U.K., as part of which she organized a major international conference at Columbia in October 2015 on “Theosophy and the Arts: Texts and Contexts of Modern Enchantment.”