Focusing on colonial India, this seminar tracks the use of the word “research” by historians and attempts to understand and contextualize the practices that constituted “research” in history before “research” as an activity assumed its present, professional university-related form.

Dipesh Chakrabarty is currently the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College, University of Chicago. He is also a Faculty Fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, an Associate Faculty of the Department of English, holds a visiting position at the Research School of Humanities & the Arts 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 is a Contributing Editor to Public Culture, and has served on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review. He is one of the editors (along with Sheldon Pollock from Columbia University and Sanjay Subrahmanyam from UCLA) of the new series South Asia Across the Disciplines published by a consortium of three university presses (Chicago, Columbia, and California). He also serves on the Board of Experts for the Humboldt Forum in Berlin.