University of Chicago, PhD '72

BIOGRAPHY

Ron Inden investigates Indian class formations in relation to changes in world ruling classes and the ways in which people have tried to articulate these changes with intellectual practices and national and ethnic "identities" in the twentieth century. He is particularly interested in people's efforts to construct paradises or utopias on earth in and beside their everyday lives. These involve practices ranging from "rituals" in medieval or traditional societies to the "media" in modern ones and, especially in India, the world of cinema. The problems of how people have situated and resituated these differing practices in a "developing" country like India bring together my historical, anthropological, and Indological interests.

University of Oxford, DPhil '15

BIOGRAPHY

Elizabeth Chatterjee is a historian of energy and the environment, with a focus on India from 1900 to the present. Her research explores how non-Western energy histories disrupt conventional understandings of capitalist development and the social dynamics of climate change.

Chatterjee’s first book manuscript, Electric Democracy: An Energy History of India from Colonialism to Climate Change (under contract with the University of Chicago Press), traces the flows of electricity to provide an energy-centered history of India’s transforming political economy since the late colonial period. In so doing, it seeks to trace the very different dynamics underlying the later, Asian-centric phase of the Great Acceleration in human impacts on the planet. In place of the conventional emphasis on North Atlantic industrialists and private multinationals, it locates the postcolonial state and popular pressures for cheap energy at the heart of our contemporary environmental predicament. 

Chatterjee’s second book-length project will provide a novel perspective on the worldwide environmental and energy crisis of the early 1970s as seen from the oil-importing global South, experimenting with how historians might deploy the multisystemic lens of Earth System Science as a methodological approach. She is exploring the links between this crisis and India’s turn to both authoritarianism and fossil fuels during this decade. At the same time, she continues to work on a wide variety of other topics in energy history, including the “infrastructural turn” in environmental history, dams that cause earthquakes, and the twentieth-century history of cow dung energy.

Chatterjee holds faculty appointments in the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU), the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and the Committee on International Relations. She also serves on the board of the UChicago Center in Delhi.

Recent course offerings

• Energy in World Civilization II
• Infrastructure Histories
• Environmental Histories of the Global South
• How (Not) to Save the World: The History of International Development
• The History of Indian Capitalism
• Environmental History (graduate colloquium)

Podcast interviews

• "Environmental Crisis and Recovery," History in Focus, season 2, episode 10 (June 2024).
• "India and the 1970s Energy Crisis w/ Elizabeth Chatterjee," American Prestige (September 2024).

Affiliated Faculty, Department of English
Courtesy Appointment, Law School
Faculty Fellow, Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory
Visiting Distinguished Professor, School of Culture, History, and Language, The Australian National University, Canberra

Australian National University, PhD ' 84

BIOGRAPHY

Dipesh Chakrabarty 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 currently the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College. He is a faculty fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory 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, and a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies. He has also served on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and Public Culture.

Honors and Awards (Selected)

• Awarded the Prix Européen de l’Essai or the European Essay Prize for Après le changement climatique: penser l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 2023), the French translation of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021)
• DLitt. (Honoris Causa), University of London (conferred at Goldsmiths), 2010
• Honorary doctorate, University of Antwerp, Belgium, 2011
• Honorary doctorate, École Normale Supérieure, 2021
• Toynbee Foundation Prize, for contributions to global history, 2014
• Tagore Memorial Prize, Government of West Bengal, 2019, for The Crises of Civilization (2018)
• Jadunath Sarkar Memorial Gold Medal, Asiatic Society of Bengal, Kolkata, 2021 for contribution to History
• Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Sciences
• Honorary Fellow, Australian Academy of the Humanities
• Fellow, British Academy

Fellowships and Visiting Professorships (Selected)

• Visiting Fellow, Max Planck Institute for Historical Sciences, 2005
• American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Fellowship, 2005–6
• Honorary Professorial Fellow, School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne, 2007–2011
• Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, 2008–9
• Fellow, Institute of Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna, 2010
• Hallsworth Visiting Professor, University of Manchester, 2010
• Dean’s Distinguished Visitor, College of Asia and Pacific, Australian National University, 2015–2027
• Visiting Professor, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, 2019
• Visiting Professor, The University of Technology, Sydney, Australia (to present)

Research Supervision

Chakrabarty’s current students in History and SALC work on a variety of topics: 20th-century Kerala, prostitution in British India, India-China relations in the 1950s, modern Islam in Bangladeshi history, youth culture in colonial Bengal, the history of modern Bengali music, state-making and representations of royalty in Nepal, the labor history of Bombay, and the energy history of Maharashtra.

Recently completed theses include work on epidemics in the British Empire, the history of the Sino-Indian boundary, the history of the idea of “popular sovereignty” in colonial India, Yunani medicine, the politics of water in Pakistan, India reform societies in nineteenth-century Britain, slavery in south India, environmental consciousness in Hindi literature, the East India Company in the eighteenth century, the Vaishnava movement in nineteenth-century Bengal, the history of the film industry in Bengal, the 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, 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, the history of the Anglo-Indian communities in India, the history of photo-journalism in Bengal, the evolution of the qazi and mufti in British India, and the intellectual history of Mughal India.

Harvard University, PhD' 90

BIOGRAPHY

I am a historian of Britain and its Empire, of comparative revolutions, comparative empires, and of northern Europe more broadly. I am both a deeply committed archival historian and a scholar who believes profoundly that historians should engage with the social sciences. My first book, Protestantism and Patriotism, was an entangled and comparative study of English and Dutch politics, culture, and society in the mid-seventeenth century. I traced the decline of apocalyptic thinking and the rise of notions of political economy in England and the Dutch Republic. My second major monograph, 1688: The First Modern Revolution, offered both a major revisionist account of England's Glorious Revolution and a reappraisal of the literature on revolutions more broadly. I showed that far from being an unrevolutionary revolution, the Revolution of 1688 radically transformed English state and society. The revolution, I suggest, can only be understood by placing it in a European and global context. Since 1688 was a radical revolution, I suggest, it is imperative to rethink the nature of revolutions since so much of that literature assumed that the later eighteenth-century French Revolution was the first modern revolution. My third monograph, The Heart of the Declaration, argued that by placing the American Revolution and its seminal document, the Declaration of Independence, in an imperial rather than proto-national context it becomes clear that Americans broke away from Britain not because they resented the imperial state but because they wanted a different kind of state—one that would actively promote social and economic prosperity and equality.

 I am currently engaged in a number of research projects. For the past decade I have been working on a Global History of the British Empire, ca. 1650–1784. This book, based on research in a wide range of European, North American, and West Indian archives, insists that the British imperial state was just as institutional strong if structurally distinct, from its rivals. Throughout the empire Britons debated and fought over the kind of imperial state they wanted. Some wanted to focus on a political economy that privileged colonial production over one that emphasized colonial consumption; some wanted an empire that favored England, while others thought the empire should be organized as a confederation; some thought chattel slavery was essential to the prosperity of the empire while others decried cattle slavery as economically and morally deleterious; some thought the empire should protect and promote the development of indigenous peoples, while others thought indigenous peoples were a barrier to imperial development. I insist that accounts of the colonies that focus on the binary relationship between a particular colony or set of colonies and Britain will necessarily misunderstand that relationship. The British Empire can only be understood as a global phenomenon. It is essential to think the empire whole. I am working on a second monograph, Partners in Revolution, that compares the Irish Revolution of 1782 and the American Revolution. I highlight the social, cultural, and ideological similarities between the Irish and American situations. The book explains why Americans severed ties with the British Empire and the Irish did not. I suggest that one of the consequences of the abortive Irish Revolution was that the re-emergence of confessional divisions in Ireland. Finally, I am working on a set of essays (maybe a book) with James Robinson of Harris Public Policy, trying to explain British divergence: why was it that Britain, and not China, India, France, or the Dutch Republic, became the first industrial nation? Why did the British state take the distinctive form that it did?

My research has been supported over the years with fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows, the ACLS, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society. I have been a visitor at All Souls College (Oxford), EHESS (Paris), IMT (Lucca) and the University of Warwick.

I am deeply committed to both undergraduate and graduate education. I am happy to supervise senior theses and doctoral dissertations on any topic in British history, the history of the British Empire, Atlantic history, Dutch history, political economy, revolutions, comparative empires, history of European ideas, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious history, and the cultural history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe.

I have supervised over twenty doctoral dissertations covering a wide range of topics. Some topics have included the origins of humanitarianism in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, the rise of the Patriot party in the eighteenth-century British Empire, the emergence of associational life in the British Empire, the East India Company and the emergence of British India, politics of the navy and the British Empire, the transformation of British India in the late eighteenth century, the Anglo-French-Indian struggle for the Ohio Valley, British imperial indigenous policy in Scotland, North America, and Bengal, the high church reaction to the Revolution of 1688, the remaking of the Church of England after the Act of Toleration, the Scottish Kirk in the early eighteenth century, the rise of opera in Britain, the making of the English Caribbean in the late seventeenth century, British monetary policy in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the rise of slave labor in the British Empire, Leisler's Rebellion and its consequences, British party politics in the early eighteenth century, the persistence of Catholicism in the British Empire, and many more.

I am a co-convenor of the History and Social Sciences and the Empires and the Atlantics forums.