Annual Swami Vivekananda Lecture with Dipesh Chakrabarty

Wednesday, May 27, 2015
5:00PM-8:00PM
Assembly Hall

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

5:00PM-8:00PM

Assembly Hall

As part of events surrounding the Vivekananda Visiting Professorship, established by the Indian Ministry of Culture to commemorate the legacy of Swami Vivekananda and to enrich scholarly life at the University of Chicago, Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty, Department of History at UChicago, will offer a talk entitled “Vivekananda’s Irish Disciple: Sister Nivedita.” This lecture will focus on the Indian life of Sister Nivedita (Margaret Elizabeth Noble, b. 1867) who arrived in India in 1898 as a disciple of Swami Vivekananda and died there in 1911. Her experience of India provides fascinating material for a cross-cultural history of the land and the people she encountered.

Dipesh Chakrabarty holds a BSc (physics honors) degree from Presidency College, University of Calcutta, a postgraduate Diploma in management (considered equivalent to MBA) from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and a PhD (history) from the Australian National University. He is currently the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College. He is also a faculty fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory and an associate faculty of the Department of English. He is a founding member of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies, a consulting editor of Critical Inquiry, a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies, and has served on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and Public Culture. He was one of the founding editors, with Sheldon Pollock from Columbia University and Sanjay Subrahmanyam from UCLA, of the 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 non-Western art for the Humboldt Forum in Berlin and has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Board to the Center for Global Cooperation Research (Bonn and Essen) since 2012.

Chakrabarty is the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Foundation Prize for his contributions to global history. He was awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of London (conferred at Goldsmiths) in 2010 and an honorary doctorate by the University of Antwerp in 2011. He was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award by the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (conferred on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Institute in 2011). He was elected an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2006 and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.

Free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Global Voices Lecture Series, Southern Asia at Chicago, SALAC/COSAS and the Indian Ministry of Culture.

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