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SIPA Faculty
Nicholas Dirks
Schermerhorn, Room 960
Professor of History and Anthropology
Phone: 212-854-7216
nbd7@columbia.edu
Biography:
Nicholas Dirks, a professor of history and anthropology, specializes in South Asian history, historical anthropology, and British colonial history. He is currently working on two new projects, one on the role of empire in India in relationship to the making of modern Britain, the other on historiography and historical theory.
His publications include The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge 1987, 2nd edition 1993); "Is Vice Versa? Historical Anthropologies and Anthropological Histories" in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, edited by T. McDonald (University of Michigan 1996); "Colonial Histories and Native Informants: Biography of an Archive" in Orientalism and the Post-Colonial Predicament, edited by Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter Van Der Veer (University of Pennsylvania 1993); and Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton 2001). Dirks has also edited Colonialism and Culture (1992) and In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory at the End of the Century (University of Minnesota 1998).
Dirks received his BA from Wesleyan University and his PhD from the University of Chicago.