Dipesh Chakrabarty

Dipesh Chakrabarty is a Bengali historian who has also made contributions to postcolonial theory and subaltern studies.

He attended Presidency College of the University of Calcutta, where he received his undergraduate degree in physics. He also received a diploma in business management from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. Later he moved on to the Australian National University in Canberra, from where he earned a PhD in history.

He is currently the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College at the University of Chicago. He was a visiting faculty at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Chakrabarty also serves as a contributing editor for Public Culture, an academic journal published by Duke University Press.

He was a member of the Subaltern Studies collective. He has recently made important contributions to the intersections between history and postcolonial theory (Provincializing Europe ), which continues and revises his earlier historical work on working-class history in Bengal (Rethinking Working-Class History). PE adds considerably to the debate of how postcolonial discourse engages in the writing of history (e.g., Robert J. C. Young's "White Mythologies"), critiquing historicism, which is intimately related to the West's notion of linear time. Chakrabarty argues that Western historiography's historicism universalizes liberalism, projecting it to all ends of...
Read More