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, named after Professor Arnold J. Toynbee, that recognizes social scientists for significant academic and public contributions to humanity. He is the author of the seminal Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000).

Biography

Dipesh Chakrabarty attended Presidency College of the University of Calcutta, where he received his undergraduate degree in physics. He also received a Post Graduate Diploma in Management (MBA) from Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. Later he moved on to the Australian National University in Canberra, from where he earned a PhD in history. Chakrabarty has had an extensive program of visiting lectureships: visiting fellow, Humanities Institute, Princeton, USA (2002); Hitesranjan Sanyal Visiting professor of history, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, University of Calcutta (2003); visitor, Humanities Center, State University of New York, Stony Brook (2004); visiting fellow, Max Planck Institute for Historical Sciences, University of Göttingen, Germany (2005); Faculty, Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory, University of California, Irvine (2005); visiting research professor, University of Technology, Sydney (2005 and 2009); visitor, Center for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi (2005); scholar-in-residence, Pratt Institute, New York (2005); visiting professor, European Humanities University, Vilnius, Lithuania (2006); Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting professor, University of Iowa (2007); distinguished visitor, Institute of Advanced Study, University of Minnesota (2007); Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2008–09): Katz Professor in the Humanities, University of Washington, Seattle (2009); Hallsworth Visiting professor, University of Manchester, England (2009); Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Vienna, Austria (2010); Lansdowne Lecturer, Victoria University, Canada (2012); Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2013). In 2014, Chakrabarty delivered the IWM Lectures in Human Sciences in Vienna; a public lecture at Cankaya Municipality (Ankara, Turkey); Principal's Distinguished Visitor, Queen's University, Canada; distinguished visitor, Humanities Institute, Stony Brook University, New York; visitor, University of Barcelona, Spain; visiting fellow, Humanities Research Centre, College of Arts & Social Sciences, Australian National University (2014); GLASS scholar, Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) – Humanities University of Leiden, (2015). He also served on the Humanities jury for the Infosys Prize from 2014 to 2016. The academic Christine Fair has accused Chakrabarty of making an inappropriate sexual comment during her time as a student in 1994. Fair also alleged that Chakrabarty made similar comments to others. The University of Chicago released a statement in 2017 inviting students to formally report such allegations. In 2021, the Graduate Employee's 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.

Honours

2004: Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2006: Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities 2010: Doctor of Letters (D.Litt. (Honoris Causa)), University of London (conferred at Goldsmiths) 2011: honorary doctorate by the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in 2011; Distinguished Alumnus Award, Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta (conferred on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the institute in 2011) 2014: Toynbee Prize, named for Professor Arnold J. Toynbee, that recognizes social scientists for significant academic and public contributions to humanity 2019: Tagore Memorial Prize (Rabindra Smriti Puraskar) awarded by the Government of West Bengal, India.

Books

Edited volumes

Selected articles

Books in Bengali Language