CEWS Profile: Gyan Prakash

After receiving a B.A. and M.A. in India, Gyan Prakash earned a Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, he is Professor of History and Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. His research and teaching is concerned with the colonial genealogies of modernity, and problems of postcolonial thought and politics. He is the author of Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (1990), and Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (1999). He has also written several articles on South Asian colonial history, and on the relationship between colonialism and history writing. In addition, he has edited several volumes of essays, including After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (1995) and has also co-authored a book on world history, Worlds Together, Worlds Apart (2002). He is a member of the Subaltern Studies Editorial Collective. After establishing his reputation in field of sub-altern studies with work on India, he now focuses on the modalities of modernity in Bombay.