Biography
Leela Prasad is Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University, with an appointment in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. She earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Leela has published extensively in the areas of Indian religions, diasporic studies, everyday ethics, decoloniality, narrative art, gender, and incarceration. She is fluent in Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, and Hindi. Leela’s books include Poetics of Conduct: Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town (Columbia University Press, 2007; winner of the AAR’s ‘Best First Book in the History of Religions’ prize), and The Audacious Raconteur: Sovereignty and Storytelling in Colonial India (Cornell University Press, 2020). She also co-edited Gender and Story in South India (SUNY Press, 2006). Leela guest-curated the first exhibition on Indian American life, Live like the Banyan Tree (Philadelphia, 1999), and co-directed the accompanying film Back and Forth. She is co-directing another film called Moved by Gandhi. Leela was the founding Faculty Director of Duke’s Center for Civic Engagement and has held leadership positions at the AAR. Her current Fulbright-supported project on Gandhi and carceral life draws on her teaching in North Carolina prisons and her collaboration with ex-prisoners in India.
Candidate Statement
I am grateful to be nominated for the position of Vice President. As we grapple with divisiveness and strife with religion as the epicenter across the world, vision and strategy have never been more important for the AAR. In the nearly quarter century that I have been associated with the AAR both as individual scholar and as part of the leadership community, I have served as an At-Large Director on the Board, and as member on the American Lectures in the History of Religions committee and the steering committee of the Hinduism Unit. I have had the opportunity to observe first-hand the AAR’s roles and reach, to appreciate the importance of its support to scholars, to participate in policy making, and to assess its areas for growth and improvement, especially in the domain of fostering diversity and inclusiveness.
I envisage that my inter-disciplinary work bridging linguistic and religious cultures, world regions, and Gandhian praxis will shape my contribution to dialogue and policy in the AAR. I trained in literary and religious studies and also in folklore and anthropology. I work with written and oral texts across centuries, and with visual media. I therefore organically understand how vital it is for the AAR to support, in tangible ways, the study of religion across borders and boundaries.
Comparative, dialogic, philosophical, and creative approaches to social challenges have been central to my research and teaching. With the AAR’s members globally studying questions essential to humanity and the environment, the organization, in my view, can and should, curate a collective voice that evokes co-being, taking an iconic stand against bigotry and ecological degradation.
As a recipient of the AAR’s research grants and a book award, I know how important the AAR’s support is to a scholar’s career. I am specially committed to finding invigorating and enduring career avenues for the next generation, AAR’s graduate student community. I will work hard to find ways in which the AAR can support—both monetarily and intellectually—its members’ research pursuits. With the goal to support junior and mid-level scholars as well as contingent faculty, I will try to create more robust platforms for emerging as well as established fields that are less well-represented.
Finally, I welcome a sustained inward gaze. Building on the work accomplished by earlier leaderships as well as lesser-heard voices in the AAR, I will continue to invite introspection on who we are and who we want to be, could be, and should be, as an organization. Such interrogation is not optional or supplementary but urgent and critical given the role of religion in a polarizing, violent world.
I am excited by the possibility of serving the AAR as Vice President. I believe that the AAR, with its learned global membership representing diverse views and religions, can lead through discourse and practice at this critical point in time. I will make empathetic listening and prompt and practical follow-up action the foundation of my service and strive to advocate and implement our best practices.