The 30th Distinguished Lecture on Religion and Culture
Fall 2023
The 30th Distinguished Lecture on Religion and Culture
Featuring Dr. Leela Prasad: Possession, Place, and Pact in Making a Generous World
Date: October 26, 2023
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Location: ECU Hendrix Theatre Auditorium
“How might ancient and medieval Indian traditions of sculpture, song, and bring an ethics and poetics of generosity to a troubled modern world? My talk will illustrate through these older traditions that it is possible to share ownership of space and things, and to create pacts of mutual moral obligations that assure each other that we all matter”
ECU Religious Studies Program and the J. Woolard and Helen Peel Distinguished Chair in Religious Studies will host Dr. Leela Prasad: Possession, Place, and Pact in Making a Generous World, the 30th Distinguished Lecture on Religion and Culture.
Dr. Prasad is an expert in several areas, including colonialism and decoloniality, Gandhi, religion and modernity, and the intersections of religion, anthropology, history, and literature. She authored “Poetics of Conduct: Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town (Columbia University Press, 2007), which was awarded the “Best First Book in the History of Religions Prize” by the American Academy of Religion. She also authored “The Audacious Raconteur: Sovereignty and Storytelling in Colonial India (Cornell University Press, 2020). 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 from 2024-2025. She has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for 2023 to pursue her ethnographic book on Gandhi–inspired individuals who have served prison sentences in contemporary India.
All are welcome to attend her lecture which is free to the public.
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