Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College, at University of Chicago. He is also the Faculty Director, University of Chicago Center in Delhi (2018-2021), a faculty fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (2004-present), 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 (Columbia University) and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (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).
Chakrabarty’s most recent book is The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago, 2021). 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 Trüper and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, of Historical Teleologies in the Modern World (Bloomsbury, 2015). His other publications include 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), and The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth, c. 1900-1950 (Chicago, 2015). 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), and (with Bain Attwood and Claudio Lomnitz) “The Public Life of History,” a special issue of Public Culture (2008). A book of essays has been published on Chakrabarty’s work: Saurabh Dube, Sanjay Seth, and Ajay Skaria eds., Dipesh Chakrabarty and the Global South: Subaltern Studies, Postcolonial Perspectives, and the Anthropocene (London: Routledge, 2020). Amongst many awards and honorary decorations, Chakrabarty 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. Chakrabarty’s research is currently focused on two areas: he is completing a book project on the implications of the science of climate change for historical and political thought (see his essay in Critical Inquiry, Win. 2009, for a beginning) and is working on two long-term projects, on democracy and political thought in South Asia and on a cultural history of Muslim-Bengali nationalism. Chakrabarty is also a regular contributor to Bengali newspapers and journals published from Kolkata.
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