Events

Speakers: Prof. Dipesh Chakraborty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, University of Chicago

BIO:He holds a BSc (physics honors) degree from Presidency College, University of Calcutta, a postgraduate Diploma in management (considered equivalent to MBA) from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and a PhD (history) from the Australian National University. He is the Faculty Director, University of Chicago Center in Delhi, a faculty fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, an associate of the Department of English, and by courtesy, a faculty member in the Law School.

He is a founding member of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies, a consulting editor of Critical Inquiry, a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies, and has served on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and Public Culture. He was one of the founding editors, with Sheldon Pollock from Columbia University and Sanjay Subrahmanyam from UCLA, of the series, South Asia Across the Disciplines, published by a consortium of three university presses (Chicago, Columbia, and California). He served on the Board of Experts for non-Western art for the Humboldt Forum in Berlin and was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board to the Center for Global Cooperation Research (Bonn and Essen) for a few years from 2012. He is also an Associate in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney 2018-2021.

He is the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Foundation Prize for his contributions to global history and of the 2019 Tagore Memorial Prize awarded by the Government of West Bengal for his book The Crises of Civilization. He was awarded a DLitt honoris causa by the University of London (conferred at Goldsmiths) in 2010 and an honorary doctorate by the University of Antwerp in 2011. He was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award by the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (conferred on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Institute in 2011). He was elected an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2006 and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.

His most recent book is The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (in press, University of Chicago). He also has collections of translated essays forthcoming in Italian with Nottetempo, in Russian with v-a-c Foundation, and in Spanish with Edicion Mimesis. A Chinese translation of Provincializing Europe is forthcoming with Commercial Press. Other recent books include The Crises of Civilization: Exploring Global and Planetary Histories (Delhi: OUP, 2018) and, with Ranajit Dasgupta, Some Aspects of Labour History of Bengal in the Nineteenth Century: Two Views (Delhi: OUP, 2018). He is also the co-editor, along with Henning Truper and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, of Historical Teleologies in the Modern World (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Date: August 28, 2021
Topic: The Democratization of Public Life and the Declining Value of Evidence: The Case of History