IN THIS SECTION
Faculty
Visiting Faculty
Louis Granados
Qunyu Tan
Emeriti Faculty
Bentley Duncan
Charles Gray
Harry Harootunian
Ping-ti Ho
Halil Inalcik
Barry Karl
Julius Kirshner
William McNeil
Peter Novick
Associated Faculty
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South
Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College.
Ph.D. Australian National University 1984
The University of Chicago
Department of History
1126 E. 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 702-8642 -- Office
(773) 834-3254 -- Fax
Email: dchakrab@uchicago.edu
Field Specialties
Modern South Asian history; subaltern, indigenous, and minority histories; history in/and public life; postcolonial theory and history; the implications of climate change for historical thinking.
Biography
Dipesh Chakrabarty holds a B.Sc (Physics Hons.) degree from Presidency College, University of Calcutta, a Post-graduate Diploma in Management (considered equivalent to MBA) from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and a Ph.D (History) from the Australian National University. He is currently the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College. He is also a Faculty Fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, an Associate Faculty of the Department of English, holds a visiting position at the Research School of Humanities at the Australian National University, and an Honorary Professorial Fellowship with the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia . He is a founding member of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies, a co-editor of Critical Inquiry, and a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies. He is a Contributing Editor to Public Culture, and has served on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review. He is one of the editors (along with Sheldon Pollock from Columbia University and Sanjay Subrahmanyam from UCLA) of the new series South Asia Across the Disciplines published by a consortium of three university presses (Chicago, Columbia, and California). He also serves on the Board of Experts for the Humboldt Forum in Berlin.
He has been, by invitation, a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2008-09): Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Vienna (2010); Katz Professor in the Humanities, University of Washington, Seattle (2009); Hallsworth Visiting Professor, The University of Manchester, U.K. (2009); Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa (2007); Distinguished Visitor, Institute of Advanced Study, The University of Minnesota (2007); Visiting Professor, European Union Humanities University, Vilnius, Lithuania (2006); Scholar-in-Residence, Pratt Institute, New York (2005); Visiting Fellow, Max Planck Institute for Historical Sciences, Goettingen (2005); Faculty, Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory, University of California, Irvine (2005); Visiting Research Professor, University of Technology, Sydney (2005 and 2009); Visitor, Center for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi (2005); Visitor, Humanities Center, State University of New York, Stony Brook (2004); Hitesranjan Sanyal Visiting Professor of History, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (2003); Visiting Fellow, Humanities Institute, Princeton (2002); Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of California, Berkeley, and has held other fellowships in Australia, India, and the US.
Chakrabarty is currently engaged in completing two books to be published by the University of Chicago Press. They are provisionally entitled Presentism and the Predicament of Postcolonial History and The Climate of History: Four Theses. His other publications include: Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940 (Princeton: 1989, 2000); Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000; second edn. 2007); Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, 2000); He has also edited (with Shahid Amin) Subaltern Studies IX (Delhi: OUP, 1996), (with Carol Breckenridge, Homi Bhabha, and Sheldon Pollock) Cosmopolitanism (Duke, 2000); (with Rochona Majumdar and Andrew Sartori) From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (Delhi: OUP, 2007); (with Bain Attwood and Claudio Lomnitz) “The Public Life of History,” a special issue of Public Culture (2008). Provincializing Europe has been translated into Italian and Spanish and is being brought out in French, Turkish, and Korean. Habitations is being translated into Arabic. A collection of two essays translated into Spanish was published in 2009: El humanismo en la era de la globalizacion and La descolonizacion y las politicas culturales (Buenos Aires: Katz Editores, and Barcelona: Centro de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona, 2009). A collection of his essays in Bengali is forthcoming.
Chakrabarty was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2004 and Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2006. He was awarded an “Eminent Scholar Award” at the International Studies Association Convention in 2007. He has been invited to receive the degree of D.Litt (Honoris Causa) from the University of London in September 2010.
Research Statement:
Chakrabarty's own research is currently focused on three areas: he is finishing a book on the history of objectivity in history – much of this is focused on the Indian historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870-1958); he has also started a book-project on the implications of the science of climate change for historical and political thinking (see his essay in Critical Inquiry, Winter 2009, for a beginning); and is working long-term towards a book on democracy and political thought in South Asia.
Chakrabarty welcomes students in all areas of modern and contemporary South Asian history and in areas of his own interests. His current students, distributed over History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, English, Anthropology, and the Divinity School work on a variety of topics: the making of the Indian constitution; the sixties in Pakistan; low-caste politics in Bengal during the Partition; Assam tea-plantations; missionaries in Orissa; religious thought among Bengali Muslims in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; mass politics in Bangladesh; labor in Delhi, and so on. Recently completed theses include work on the East India Company in the eighteenth century; history of the film industry in Bengal; history of housing in Bombay in the early part of the twentieth century; comparative indigenous histories of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand; the culture-concept in Bengali history; visual aspects of the rebellion of 1857.
Publications
"The Fall and Rise of Indian Sports History," Introductory essay to Sport in South Asian Society, edited by Boria Majumdar and J. A. Mangan, Routledge. 2005.
"After History: Vergenheit archivieren, erfahren und zerstören" in Historische Anthropologie (Gottingen, Germany), 13 (1), 2005. German translation of "After History: Archiving, Preserving, and Destroying the Past." (unpublished in English).
"The Legacies of Bandung: Decolonization and the Politics of Culture," Economic and Political Weekly, 12 November 2005.
"Recording the Past: How popular culture is shaping the future of history," Biblio (Delhi), vol.10, Nos. 9-10. Translated into Malayalam in Pachakuthira, February 2006.
"Subaltern History as Political Thought" in V. R. Mehta and Thomas Pantham eds., Political Ideas in Modern India: Thematic Explorations (Delhi: Sage, 2006).
"A Global and Multicultural 'Discipline' of History?", review-essay in History and Theory, Vol.45, No.1, February 2006.
"Politics Unlimited: The Global Adivasi and Debates about the Political," Afterword to Bengt A. Karlsson and Tanka B. Subba eds. The Politics of Indigeneity in India (London: Routledge, 2006).
"Risky Histories: Indigenous pasts, democracy, and the discipline of history - a dialogue between Dipesh Chakrabarty and Bain Attwood," Meanjin (Melbourne), vol.65, no.1, 2006.
(Interview) "Dipesh Chakrabarty: Quelle histoire pour les dominés?," Sciences Humaines (Paris), October 2006.
" 'In the Name of Politics': Democracy and the Power of the Multitude in India," Public Culture, vol.19, no.1, Winter 2007.
"Remembering 1857: An Introductory Note," Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XLII, No. 19, May 12, 2007
(with Rochona Majumdar), "Mangal Pandey: Film and History," Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XLII, No. 19, May 12, 2007.
"History and the Politics of Recognition" in Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alan Munslow eds., Manifestos for Historians (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 77-86.
"Das Wisssen der Weltregionen: Birgit Schäbler im Gespräch mit Dipesh Chakrabarty," in Birgit Schäbler ed., Area Studies und die Welt: Weltregionen und neue Globalgeschichte (Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2007), pp.252-258.
L'Humanisme En Una Era Global/ Humanism in An Age of Globalization, (Barcelona: Center for Contemporary Culture, 2008).
"In Defense of Provincializing Europe: A Response to Carola Dietze" in History and Theory, vol. 17, no. 1, 2008, pp.85-96.
"The Public Life of History: An Argument Out of India" in Public Culture, vol. 20, no. 1, Winter 2008, pp. 143-168. Special issue on "The Public Life of History" edited by Bain Attwood, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Claudio Lomnitz.
"The Climate of History: Four Theses," forthcoming in Critical Inquiry, Winter 2009.
Al Margen de Europe (Barcelona: Tusquets Ediciones, 2008). Spanish translation of Provincializing Europe.
"Greg Dening: A Personal Tribute," Postcolonial Studies, vol.11, no. 2, 2008, pp. 227-228.
"Foreword" to Colonial Modernization and Gandhi. Saila Kumar Ghosh, (Calcutta: Papyrus, 2008), pp. 5-8.
"Positive Uneinigkeit: Interview mit dem Historiker Dipesh Chakrabarty zum Projekt der Subaltern Studies und der 'Provinzialisierung' Europas," Springerin, Heft 2, Frühjahr 2008, (Vienna), pp. 18-23. Translation of an interview originally published in Sciences Humaines, Paris, October 2006.
"Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History" (reprint) in Shaheen Merali, ed., Re-Imagining Asia: A Thousand Years of Separation (London: Saqi, 2008), pp.76-87. Translated into German as "Poscolonialität und die List der Geschichte" in Shaheen Merali ed., Re-Imagining Asia: A Thousand Years of Separation (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt : London, Saqi, 2008), pp.64-82. Also being reprinted in John Tosh ed., Historians on History (Essex). Forthcoming.
A French translation of Provincializing Europe to be published shortly by Editions Amsterdam, Paris. Also Polish and Turkish translations are forthcoming.
"The Names and Repetitions of Postcolonial History" - "Preface" to Rachel Harrison and Peter Jackson eds. The Ambiguous Allures of the West: Essays on Thai Identity, Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2009, pp. vii-xvii.
French translation of "Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography." Forthcoming in a volume edited by Professor Taieb Belghazi in honor of the pioneer Moroccan historian Abderrahman Mouedden (publishers: Toubkai, Rabat, Morocco).
" 'Quelle histoire pour les dominés?' Entretien avec Dipesh Chakrabarty" in Histoire globale. Un nouveau regard sur le monde. (Paris: Sciences Humaines.). Forthcoming. 2008.
"The Power of Superstition in Public Life in India." Forthcoming in the Journal of Contemporary Thought (Baroda, India). Special issue on "the political."
"Empire, Ethics, and the Calling of History" - being published in a volume edited by Alf Ludtke and Senastian Jobs (University of Erfurt, Germany).
"Nation and Imagination" (a chapter from Provincializing Europe) reprinted in Ira Livingston ed., Poetry and Cultural Studies (University of Illinois Press). Forthcoming.
“The Modern and the Secular in the West: An Outsider’s View” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Jun 1, 2009; 77: 393-403 (a review essay on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age). Being published in German in Transit (Austria).
“Bourgeois Categories Made Global: Utopian and Actual Lives of Historical Documents in India,” Economic and Political Weekly, June 20, 2009, pp. 67-75.
“Historicism and Its Supplements: A Note on a Predicament Shared By Medieval and Postcolonial Studies,” in Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul eds. Medievalisms and the Postcolonial World, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, pp. 109-22.
“Aboriginal and Subaltern Studies” in Bain Attwood and Tom Griffiths eds. Frontier, Race, Nation: Henry Reynolds and Australian History, Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009, pp. 55-70.
“The Home and the World in Sumit Sarkar’s History of the Swadeshi Movement,” concluding essay in Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908 (Delhi: Permanent Black, new edition, forthcoming).
“Identity and Violence” Towards a Critique of Amartya Sen” in Antonio Pinto Rebeiro ed., Can There be Life Without the Other? (Manchester: Carcanet and Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, 2009), pp. 16-26. Simultaneously published in Portuguese from Lisbon.
"Le Climat de L'Histoire: Quatre Theses," La Revue Internationale (Paris), January-February 2010, French translation of "The Climate of History: Four Theses" (also carried in Eurozine, 30 October 2009.
"Humanism in a Global World," in Joern Reusen, ed., Humanism in Intercultural Perspective, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2009, pp. 23-36.
(with Rochona Majumdar), "Gandhi's Gita and Politics as Such," Journal of Modern Intellectual History (forthcoming).