Joel Lee

Areas of Expertise

My research focuses on caste and its entanglement with religion, labor, environment, secrecy and the sensorium in South Asia. My first book, Deceptive Majority: Dalits, Hinduism, and Underground Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2021), investigates the emergence and development of a core premise of Hindu nationalism—the idea that the “untouchables” of India are and always have been, in some sense, “Hindu”—from the early twentieth century onward as well as the enduring, often clandestine traditions of Dalit religious autonomy that this idea obscures from view. Described by Arundhati Roy as “intriguing, delightfully written,” and “a wonderful book,” Deceptive Majority won an Honorable Mention for the Clifford Geertz Book Prize.

With K. Satyanarayana I co-edited Concealing Caste: Passing and Personhood in Dalit Literature (Oxford University Press, 2023). This collection of short stories and autobiographical essays in translation from Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi and Tamil brings together for the first time Dalit writings on the widespread yet scarcely studied practice of disguising caste or experimenting with caste self-presentation; our introduction contextualizes the practice and puts it into conversation with the literature on racial “passing” in the United States. My current book project brings this research focus from literature to ethnography. This study follows the extraordinary lives and insights of domestic workers, police officers, musicians, bureaucrats and software engineers in the city of Lucknow who conceal Dalit origins and risk adopting “high caste” personae in everyday life.

My articles treat topics including the sensory and environmental consequences of social hierarchy; caste in Islam and Dalit Muslim lifeworlds; sanitation labor in pandemic times; caste affect; and social theory concepts in the north Indian vernacular such as घृणा/گھرنا/ghrina (disgust as transitive practice), पहचान/پہچان/pahchan (identity-recognition dialectic), and छाप/چھاپ/chhaap (stamp, impression, duplicate). Research and teaching interests also include discard studies, anticaste thought, linguistic and semiotic theory, translation, and Hindi and Urdu literature.