News & Events University of Chicago Professor to Deliver Amherst College’s Hugh Hawkins Lecture Sept. 24

August 27, 2009                            
 
AMHERST, Mass.—Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College at the University of Chicago, will deliver Amherst College’s annual Hugh Hawkins lecture, titled “Between Globalization and Global Warming: The Long and the Short of Human History,” on Thursday, Sept. 24, at 4:30 p.m. in Pruyne Lecture Hall of Amherst College’s Fayerweather Hall. Sponsored by the Department of History and the Dean of the Faculty, the lecture is free and open to the public.

In addition to his position at the University of Chicago, Chakrabarty is a faculty fellow at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory and holds a visiting position at the Research School of Humanities at the Australian National University and an honorary professorial fellowship with the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is a founding member of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies, a co-editor of Critical Inquiry and a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies. He has also served on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and Public Culture. Some of his books include Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies and From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition. French and Spanish translations of Provincializing Europe are due out in 2008.

Chakrabarty was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2004 and an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2006. His current research is focused on the development of history as a profession in South Asia in the first half of the 20th century and its relationship to public life. He has also been studying changing forms of mass-politics in the subcontinent.

The annual Hawkins Lecture honors Hugh Hawkins, professor emeritus of history and American studies at Amherst. A distinguished scholar of American higher education, of the American South and of cultural and intellectual history, Hawkins retired in 2000 after teaching for more than 40 years at Amherst, where he helped build both the history and the American studies departments.