Partha Chatterjee is Professor of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. A political theorist, historian, and anthropologist he studied at Presidency College in Calcutta, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. He divides his time between Columbia University and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, where he was the Director from 1997 to 2007. He is the author of more than twenty books, monographs and edited volumes and is a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective. He as awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize for 2009 for outstanding achievements in the field of Asian studies.
His books include: The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton University Press, 2012); Lineages of Political Society (Columbia University Press, 2011); Empire and Nation: Selected Essays 1985-2005 (Columbia University Press, 2010); The Politics of the Governed (Columbia University Press, 2004) translated into Turkish, Italian, French, and Chinese; A Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal(Princeton University Press, 2002); A Possible India: Essays in Political Criticism (Oxford University Press, 1997); The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton University Press, 1993), and Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Zed Books, 1993). He is also a poet, playwright, and actor. In the Mira Nair film The Namesake (2007), he played the role of “A Reformed Hindoo.”