ECS Faber Lecture – Provincializing Europe, 25 Years On

Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty from the University of Chicago will be delivering the 2025-2026 Annual ECS Eberhard L. Faber 1915 Memorial Fund Lecture.

In this lecture, Dipesh Chakrabarty takes a retrospective look at the origins and reception of his book Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000) to discuss why and how an intellectual project such as “provincializing Europe” emerged at the turn of the century from the insurgent historiography of Subaltern Studies, a series of publications on colonial South Asia (1982-2005) inspired and led by Ranajit Guha (1923-2023). What was the “Europe” the book sought to provincialize? What did it mean to “provincialize” this Europe? What was the significance of this exercise and what might be the relevance of such a project today?

Reception to Follow

This event is free and open to the public.  Your registration is requested here.

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is one of the founders of Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Studies, and a consulting editor for Critical Inquiry. He has served on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and Public Culture. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is also an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of London, the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and the École Normale Supérieure in France. His honors and awards include a Distinguished Alumnus award from the Indian Institute of Management, the Toynbee Prize for his contributions to global history, the Tagore Memorial Prize, given by the Government of West Bengal, India, and the European Essay Prize for the French translation of his book The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021; in French 2023). His most recent book is: One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax (Waltham, Mass.: University of Brandeis Press, 2023).

To read Professor Chakrabarty’s full biography, please visit the University of Chicago website. 

Funding provided by the Eberhard L. Faber 1915 Memorial Fund in the Humanities Council.