Panel Discussion of Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty's book "The Climate of History in a Planetary Age"

When: Wednesday, September 29, 2021, 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Where: Online Zoom

Speaker: Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty

The Queen Mary Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences welcomes Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty to a panel discussion of his recent book, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. In this bold work Chakrabarty invites us to see ourselves from two perspectives at once: the (human-centred) global and the (human-decentred) planetary. The consequence of doing so, which Chakrabarty explores in this work, forces us to reconsider everything from the nature of human agency to literature to humanism itself. As the geological intrudes upon social life, we must take stock and rethink our way forward. Join us online for this public event, featuring responses by Queen Mary faculty members Chris Moffat and Shital Pravinchandra. 

Participants:

Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty (DC) teaches History and South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000;2008) and more recently of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021).

Chair: Professor Simon Reid-Henry, Director of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of Historical and Political Geography at Queen Mary University of London.

Dr. Chris Moffat, Lecturer in South Asian History, a political and intellectual historian of modern South Asia with an interest in the shape and form of history’s ‘public life’ across the broader postcolonial world. His work engages both the philosophy and anthropology of the discipline. He is the author of "India's Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh", Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Dr. Shital Pravinchandra, Lecturer in Comparative Literature, interested in the relevance of postcolonial studies today, and whether it has been supplanted by other approaches, such as ecocriticism, world literature or globalization studies. Her current book project is entitled "Same Difference: Postcolonial Studies in the Age of Life Science." Her future projects will explore the popularity of short story in South Asian regional-language literatures, and the contrasting dominance of the novel in Anglophone South Asian writing.