Dipesh Chakrabarty

Dipesh Chakrabarty (born 1948 in Kolkata, India) is an Indian historian and leading scholar of postcolonial theory and subaltern studies. He is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in history at the University of Chicago, and is the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Prize, which recognizes social scientists for significant academic and public contributions to humanity. He is the author of the book Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference and of the essay "The Climate of History: Four Theses" (2009).

Education Dipesh Chakrabarty attended Presidency College, Kolkata, where he received his undergraduate degree in physics. He also received a postgraduate diploma in management (MBA) from Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. Later he attended the Australian National University in Canberra, where he earned a PhD in history. and GLASS scholar at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (2015).

In 2014, Chakrabarty delivered the IWM Lectures in Human Sciences and a public lecture at Çankaya District. In 2015, he gave one of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale University on "The Human Condition in the Anthropocene".

He also served on the Humanities jury for the Infosys Prize from 2014 to 2016.

Sexual harassment allegations Academic C. Christine Fair accused Chakrabarty of making inappropriate sexual comments to her and others during her time as a student in 1994. The University of Chicago released a statement in 2017 inviting students to formally report such allegations. In 2021, the Graduate Employees' Organization at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign protested the university's decision to host Chakrabarty at a roundtable on criticism and interpretive theory, in response to Fair's allegations.

Following a defamation lawsuit, Fair retracted some of the allegations against Chakrabarty and his wife.

Honours

2004: Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2006: Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities 2010: Honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of London 2014: Toynbee Prize 2019: Rabindra Puraskar from the Government of West Bengal for The Crisis of Civilization মানবিকতা ও অ-মানবিকতা (অনুষ্টুপ, 2018) মনোরথের ঠিকানা (অনুষ্টুপ, 2018) উন্নয়ন ও আধুনিকতা: বর্তমান-সর্বস্ব এই সময় (কলিকাতা লেটারপ্রেস, 2019) সাম্প্রতিক ইতিহাস-ভাবনা: আমার ইতিহাসের আলপথ ধরে (তালপাতা প্রকাশনা, 2019) বন্ধুর চিঠি বন্ধুকে (with রাঘব বন্দ্যোপাধ্যায়) (অনুষ্টুপ, 2019) স্মৃতি সত্তা সংলাপ (নির্ঝর, 2020) জলবায়ু পরিবর্তন ও বর্তমান অতিমারি: মানুষের ইতিহাসে একটি সন্ধিক্ষণ (লৌকিক প্রকাশন, 2021)

Edited volumes Cosmopolitanism (2002), edited with Carol Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, and Homi K. Bhabha From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (2007), edited with Rochona Majumdar and Andrew Sartori Historical Teleologies in the Modern World (2015), edited with Henning Trüper and Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Selected articles "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?" Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 1–26. "The Death of History? Historical Consciousness and the Culture of Late Capitalism." Public Culture 4.2 (Spring 1992): 47–65. "Universalism and Belonging in the Logic of Capital." Public Culture 12.3 (Fall 2000): 653–678. "Where Is the Now?" Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 458–462. "The Climate of History: Four Theses." Critical Inquiry 35.2 (Winter 2009): 197–222. "Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change." New Literary History 43.1 (Winter 2012): 1–18. "Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories." Critical Inquiry 41.1 (Autumn 2014): 1–23. "Humanities in the Anthropocene: The Crisis of an Enduring Kantian Fable." New Literary History 47.2/3 (Spring–Summer 2016): 377–397.