Princeton University

Educated in India and the United States, Gyan Prakash specializes in the history of modern India. His general field of research and teaching interests concerns urban modernity, the colonial genealogies of modernity, and problems of postcolonial thought and politics. He advises graduate students on modern South Asian history, comparative colonialism and postcolonial theory, urban history, global history, and history of science. 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, and edited several volumes of essays, including After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (1995). He has also co-authored a book on world history, Worlds Together, Worlds Apart (2002). His current research interest centers on urban history, and he is writing a book provisionally entitled "Bombay Fables."  In addition to writing for scholarly journals, his reviews and essays also appear in general publications such as Times of India, India Today, Timeout Mumbai, American Scholar, and The Nation.

As a member of Subaltern Studies editorial collective, he continues to be actively involved in the publication and other intellectual activities of this group of scholars. During the last five years, a major part of his responsibility has been the directorship of Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. Under him, the Davis Center conducted a two-year program on "Cities: Space, Society, and History" during 2003-05, and another two-year cycle on "Utopia/Dystopia: Historical Conditions of Possibility." He completed his directorship of the Davis Center Davis Center with a one-year program on "Fear" in 2007-08.
Education

• B.A. in History (Honours), University of Delhi
• M.A. in History, Jawaharlal Nehru University
• Ph.D. in History, University of Pennsylvania