معرفی
Joel Lee is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Williams College and Chair of Asian Studies. His research examines caste hierarchies, religion, labor, and sensory environments in South Asia. He has authored Deceptive Majority: Dalits, Hinduism, and Underground Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which received an Honorable Mention for the Clifford Geertz Book Prize, and co-edited Concealing Caste: Passing and Personhood in Dalit Literature (Oxford University Press, 2023) with K. Satyanarayana. His work explores caste fluidity, anticaste thought, and the political economy of disgust.
Lee’s teaching spans courses like 'Language and Power,' 'Waste and Value,' and 'Caste, Race, Hierarchy,' with interdisciplinary links to environmental studies, gender, and religious studies. His scholarly contributions include ethnographic and theoretical analyses of caste in Islam, sanitation labor, and vernacular social theory concepts. He investigates how caste shapes everyday life through identity, labor, and spatial practices.
- Honorable Mention: Clifford Geertz Book Prize for 'Deceptive Majority'
