We cordially invite you to a public lecture by Dipesh Chakrabarty, which will take place on September 1, 2026, at the University of Warsaw (ul. Dobra 55, Room 1.110). The event is part of our Summer School Asynchronous History.

1 September 2026, 5pm

This lecture will track some of the strategies by which nineteenth-century European distinctions between "advanced" and "backward" nations/peoples were contested by (Europeanised) intellectuals from the colonies or so-called backward regions of Europe. It will discuss how the legacies of these contestations have played out in our time in some key debates on the historical nature of the "global."  

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Professor of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective, and the founding editor of Postcolonial Studies. Through his scholarly work, Chakrabarty has both “provincialized Europe” and brought contemporary humanities back down to earth. Through social history, he has arrived at planetary history, preventing historians from viewing the significance of their work solely in the past. His works have transformed the way we problematize our present.

Drawing on philosophical reflection and the experiences of the Global South, Chakrabarty points out that the teleological and Eurocentric narrative of progress and emancipation has never been an autonomous or universal process. He proposes a planetary perspective that takes into account the impact of capital and colonial power structures. In his more recent works, Chakrabarty emphasizes that humanity has significantly transformed the conditions under which the planet functions, influencing them over the long term. Drawing on findings from Earth system science, the author challenges the centrality of human agency in history and encourages us to rethink politics, responsibility, and freedom from a perspective that transcends the exclusively human viewpoint. From this perspective, planetary consciousness reveals both the limitations of the nation-state and the ambiguous role of the global economy. His view of political time compels us, ultimately, to understand “universal history” as a material phenomenon—a genuine barrier to our civilization.

Chakrabarty is a recipient of the Toynbee Prize and holds honorary doctorates from universities in London and Antwerp, as well as from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a corresponding member of the British Academy. His most important books include: Rethinking Working-Class History (Princeton 1989), Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton 2000), The Crises of Civilization: Exploring Global and Planetary Histories (Oxford 2018), The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago 2021), and One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax (2023).