Dipesh Chakrabarty

Career

Chakrabarty's academic appointments include visiting fellow at the Princeton Humanities Institute (2002); visiting professor of history at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (2003); visitor at the State University of New York Humanities Center (2004); visiting fellow at the University of Göttingen Max Planck Institute for Historical Sciences (2005); faculty at the University of California, Irvine Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory (2005); visiting research professor at the University of Technology Sydney (2005 and 2009); visitor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University Center for Historical Studies (2005); scholar-in-residence at the Pratt Institute (2005); visiting professor at the European Humanities University (2006); Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa (2007); Distinguished Visitor at the University of Minnesota Institute of Advanced Study (2007); fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study (2008–09); Katz Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington (2009); Hallsworth Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester (2009); Institute for Human Science (IWM) (2010); Lansdowne Lecturer at Victoria University, Toronto (2012); Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2013); Principal's Distinguished Visitor at Queen's University at Kingston; distinguished visitor at the Stony Brook University Humanities Institute; visitor at the University of Barcelona; visiting fellow at the Australian National University Humanities Research Centre (2014); 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
• 2011: Honorary Doctorate from the University of Antwerp
• 2011: Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta
• 2014: Toynbee Prize
• 2019: Rabindra Puraskar from the Government of West Bengal for The Crisis of Civilization
• 2021: Honorary doctorate from the École normale supérieure
• 2021: Jadunath Sarkar Memorial Gold Medal from The Asiatic Society
• 2023: Prix européen de l’essai for Après le changement climatique: penser l’histoire (French translation of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age)