Dipesh Chakrabarty

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the Faculty Director of the University of Chicago Centre in Delhi, a faculty fellow of the Chicago Centre for Contemporary Theory, an associate of the Department of English, and by courtesy, a faculty member in the Law School. He holds a BSc (physics honours) degree from Presidency College, University of Calcutta, a postgraduate Diploma in management from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and a PhD (history) from the Australian National University.

Prof. Chakrabarty is the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Foundation Prize for his contributions to global history and of the 2019 Tagore Memorial Prize, which was awarded by the Government of West Bengal for his book The Crises of Civilization. He received the degree of Honorary doctorate from the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, in 2021, a DLitt (Honoris Causa) from the University of London (conferred at Goldsmiths) in 2010, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in 2011. He was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award by the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta 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.

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 (along 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). Prof. Chakrabarty has been a visiting scholar and distinguished lecturer at many institutions around the world, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Toronto, Queens (Canada), University College London, Paris, Leiden, Barcelona, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Max Planck Institute for Historical Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (Kolkata), Australian National University, and the ENS, Paris.

Prof. Chakrabarty is the author and editor of many books, including Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940 (Princeton, 1989; 2000), Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000; second edition, 2008), Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, 2002), The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth (Chicago, 2015), The Crises of Civilization: Exploring Global and Planetary Histories (Oxford, 2018), and The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago, 2021). He is also the author of three collections of essays written originally in Bengali. His books and articles have been translated into several languages including German, French, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, Korean, Portuguese, Chinese, and Arabic