Gauri Viswanathan

Gauri Viswanathan

BIOGRAPHY

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; Oxford, 1998) 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. Prof. Viswanathan is completing a book entitled In Search of Blavatsky. She has held numerous visiting chairs, among them the Beckman Professorship at UC Berkeley, and she was most recently an Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She has received Guggenheim, NEH and Mellon fellowships, and was a fellow at various international research institutes. She is co-editor of the book series South Asia Across the Disciplines, published jointly by the university presses of Columbia, Chicago and California. Among Prof. Viswanathan’s recent articles on Theosophy-related topics are ‘“Have Animals Souls?” Theosophy and the Suffering Body’, PMLA (2011), ‘The Great Game: The Geopolitics of Secret Knowledge’, in Locating Transnational Ideals (2009), ‘Spectrality’s Secret Sharers’, in Beyond the Black Atlantic (2006), ‘Ireland, India, and the Poetics of Internationalism’, Journal of World History (2004), and ‘The Ordinary Business of Occultism’, Critical Inquiry (2000).

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