Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty

When history needed to confront the Anthropocene, the world turned to Dipesh Chakrabarty. Born in Kolkata, Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago and one of the most transformative intellectual voices of our age. A founding member of Subaltern Studies and a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Chicago, he helped reshape how the world reads history from the margins. His landmark works — Provincializing Europe (2000), The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021), and One Planet, Many Worlds (2023) — have made him the defining theorist of the Anthropocene in the humanities. His honours are as global as his ideas. He received the Toynbee Prize—named after the legendary historian Arnold J. Toynbee—for significant academic and public contributions to humanity. He also received the Tagore Memorial Prize, awarded by the Government of West Bengal. The French translation of The Climate of History was awarded the 2024 European Essay Prize. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of London, the University of Antwerp, and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.