Sumit Guha | Ecologies of Empire in South Asia: Lands of Resistance, Terrains of Refuge

Sumit Guha is Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor in History at the University of Texas at Austin. He was born in New Delhi, India but moved to Rome, Italy with his parents when he was three. He thus had his early schooling in Italian, a language that he still speaks and reads. He returned to India in 1963, completed his schooling and took his first degrees in India before winning a scholarship to the University of Cambridge where he received his Phd in History in 1982. He returned to India and taught in his alma mater, St. Stephen’s College in Delhi from 1981 to 1991. He subsequently taught at other institutions in India before moving to the USA to become S.P. Das Professor at Brown University in 2000. He left Brown in 2004 to become Professor II at Rutgers University and moved from there to the University of Texas in 2013. His scholarship has been recognized in the U.S. and abroad through awards that include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (2009) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (2018). He was elected “Directeur d’Etudes” at the Ecole des Haute Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris in 2013. He has just been awarded the University of Texas Research Career Excellence Award for 2023-24.

Guha knows four Indian languages (including Sanskrit) and five European languages. Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400–1900 is his seventh single-author monograph. It represents the fructification of the research whose promise was recognized by the NEH in 2018. A Chinese translation is under way.