Information

Membership Number: FCA3402

Membership Type: Fellowship

Division: Humanities

Corresponding Email: *****rab@uchicago.edu

Homepage(s): https://history.uchicago.edu/directory/dipesh-chakrabarty 

Present and Previous Positions

Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations, the University of Chicago

Fields of Scholarship and Research Interests

Climate Change and Human History; Modern South Asian History; Postcolonial Thought; Historical Theory; Global and Planetary History

Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty is widely recognized for his contributions to the history of modern South Asia, postcolonial thought, and historical theory. His scholarship has been especially important in rethinking how historians approach modernity, Eurocentrism, and the place of non-Western societies in the writing of history. Working from South Asian materials yet addressing questions of broad theoretical significance, he has helped open new ways of thinking about the relationship between historical difference, universal categories, and the global circulation of political and intellectual forms.

He is also well known as a founding member of Subaltern Studies and as a major figure in the development of postcolonial scholarship. Over the course of his career, his work has ranged from labor history and the social history of Bengal and modern India to larger reflections on democracy, historical understanding, and the limits of historicism. In more recent years, he has extended these concerns into the domains of climate change, the Anthropocene, and planetary history, asking how the humanities and historical thought must respond when human history is increasingly understood within the wider history of the Earth System. What distinguishes Professor Chakrabarty’s work is the way it brings regional historical knowledge into sustained conversation with some of the largest intellectual questions of our time. His scholarship has influenced historians, political theorists, literary scholars, and scholars in the environmental humanities alike, and has made him a central voice in contemporary debates on postcoloniality, global history, and the conceptual challenges posed by the planetary condition.

Honors, Awards and Other Membership

Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 2004)
Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (elected 2006)
Corresponding Fellow / International Fellow of the British Academy (elected 2023)
Toynbee Prize, for contributions to global history (2014)
Tagore Memorial Prize, Government of West Bengal, for The Crises of Civilization (2019)
Jadunath Sarkar Memorial Gold Medal, Asiatic Society of Bengal, Kolkata (2021)
European Essay Prize / Prix Européen de l’Essai, for the French translation of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2024)
DLitt (Honoris Causa), University of London, conferred at Goldsmiths (2010)
Honorary Doctorate, University of Antwerp (2011)
Honorary Doctorate, École Normale Supérieure (2021)

Selected Publications

Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940. Princeton University Press, 1989.
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press, 2000; new edition with new preface, 2007.
Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. University of Chicago Press, 2002.
The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth. University of Chicago Press, 2015.
The Crisis of Civilization. Oxford University Press, 2018.
The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. University of Chicago Press, 2021.
One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax. Brandeis University Press, 2023.

Other Information

Professor Chakrabarty's importance lies not only in the originality of individual books, but in the way his scholarship has altered entire fields of inquiry. Provincializing Europe became one of the defining works of postcolonial historical thought by challenging the universal, often unexamined authority long granted to European categories in the writing of history. His later work carried that same critical force into the planetary present, asking how historians and humanists must rethink human agency, time, and political life once climate change places human history within the larger history of the Earth System.

What makes his career especially remarkable is the unusual range of intellectual worlds he has helped connect: South Asian social history, historical theory, political thought, literary and cultural criticism, and the environmental humanities. His work has thus spoken not only to historians of India or empire, but to scholars across the humanities seeking new ways to think about modernity, democracy, globalization, and the future of historical understanding itself.