Dipesh Chakrabarty, the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Law at the University of Chicago will deliver the 2015 Tanner Lectures on Human Values Feb. 18-20.
The theme of Chakrabarty’s lectures is “The Human Condition in the Anthropocene.” Chakrabarty will give the first talk, titled “Climate Change as Epochal Consciousness,” on Wednesday, Feb. 18; and the second, “Decentering the Human? Gaia,” on Thursday, Feb. 19. Both will take place at 5 p.m. Chakrabarty will be joined by scholars Daniel Lord Smail of Harvard University, and Wai Chee Dimock and Michael Warner of Yale for a roundtable discussion at 10:30 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 20. Gary Tomlinson, director of the Whitney Humanities Center (WHC), will moderate. The lectures and the panel discussion, which are free and open to the public, will take place in the WHC auditorium, 53 Wall St.
Chakrabarty taught at the University of Melbourne and the Australian National University before moving to Chicago. He is the author of numerous books including “The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth” (forthcoming in 2015); “Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference”; “Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies”; and “Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940.”
He is a founding member of the editorial collective Subaltern Studies, a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies, and a consulting editor of Critical Inquiry. Chakrabarty is currently working on a book on climate change and on a collection of essays on history’s relation to the present. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2006. He was recently named the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Prize for his contributions to global history.
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values were established by the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner, who hoped that these lectures would contribute to the intellectual and moral life of humankind.
