Faculty Fellow

Dipesh Chakrabarty

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

Biography

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s research interests are in modern South Asian history and historiography, in postcolonial theory and its impact on history-writing, and in comparative studies of questions and politics of modernity.

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 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). He also serves on the Board of Experts for non-Western art for the Humboldt Forum in Berlin and has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Board to the Center for Global Cooperation Research (Bonn and Essen) since 2012.

To learn more about his research and publications, please see his profile page at the University of Chicago Department of History.

dchakrab@uchicago.edu

Topics

Featured Project

Sonic Borderlands of South Asia

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2025 – 2027

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Projects

Reimagining Cosmopolitanism

This project is reconceptualizing global citizenship for a new era. Collaborators come from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines including anthropology, political science, history, English, geography, cultural studies, sociology, and cinema and media studies. Papers developed over the course of...

This project seeks to reconceive what it means to be a citizen of the world today—as extractive capitalism and climate change put the planetary environment at risk; electoral democracies are seized by hypernationalism, racism, and xenophobia; revolutions in communications and technology open up new ...

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2022 – 2025

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Entanglements of the Indian Past

Hemachandra, Leaf from a Jain manuscript, 13th century

Entanglements of the Indian Past

A series of interdisciplinary workshops focused on key themes and pivotal moments that shaped the course of Indian historiography will help chart a future course for the study of the Indian past.

The Entanglements of the Indian Past project aims to make the study of the Indian past more self-conscious of the forces that have shaped it. A three-year series of interdisciplinary workshops will focus on three issues where serious engagement is critical: caste, materiality, and historicality. ...

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2021 – 2026

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The Logic and Politics of Climate Change

Where and how should the humanities and social sciences intervene in debates about climate change in order to place the science-policy nexus on more ethically, epistemically, and politically responsible foundations?

The profound and intensifying effects of climate change will likely bring significant harm to those vulnerable to the harsher environment to come, human or otherwise. Yet climate debates have so far been dominated by scientists and policymakers, with limited effectiveness in terms of either public ...

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2017 – 2018

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Planetary History: Growth in the Anthropocene

This project explored the history of planetary change through close analysis of the biophysical dimension of economic development and the history of earth system science.

One of the most striking and often remarked upon effects of climate change is its power to unsettle our basic understanding of the modern world. Our planet is changing into a strange and unstable new environment, in a process seemingly outside technological control. The fossil fuels that once ...

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2018 – 2021

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Theorizing Indian Democracy

A close look at the meanings and practices of democracy in India deepened understanding of India’s politics and history and helped identify non-Western forms of democracy.

Indian politics have become an ever more important object of study for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Indian democracy has long been considered an exceptional case—an unlikely political system for a society marked by high levels of inequality and remarkable fragmentation and ...

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2018 – 2019

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