Climate Change and the Historical Imagination

In this talk, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty will suggest that man-made global warming spells the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history. He will ask us to contemplate how our planetary crisis qualifies our sense of human universals while challenging our capacity for historical understanding.

Chakrabarty obtained his Ph.D. in History from the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia in 1984. He holds honorary degrees from the University of London and the University of Antwerp. His current research focuses on anthropogenic climate change and its implications for historical thinking, on the history of the idea of historical truth, and on historical genealogies of crowd-politics in India.

Co-sponsored by ASU's Institute for Humanities Research. For questions or more information, contact the Institute for Humanities Research at (480) 965-3000 or ihr@asu.edu.