Call for aplicants: Asynchronous Histories Summer School, 31 August – 4 September 2026
The Asynchronous Histories Summer School aims to explore regions and historical moments shaped by the coexistence of divergent and asynchronous sociopolitical processes. Such conditions often produce paradoxical outcomes, revealing unexpected tensions when seemingly well-established actors, institutions, and mechanisms are put into practice.
To examine these complex dynamics, participants will engage with a wide range of topics, including theories of historical time, unconventional transfers of ideas and practices between East and West, and alternative pathways of modernization. The programme will feature lectures, seminars, and discussions led by distinguished scholars, including participation of Prof. Dipesh Chakrabarty. During AHSS he will deliver an open lecture and lead a seminar with the school’s students.
In response to numerous requests, we have decided to extend the application deadline until 30 June 2026.
More information: https://wsnsir.uw.edu.pl/asynchronous-histories-summer-school-2/
Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective, and a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies. Through his scholarly work, Chakrabarty has both “provincialized Europe” and brought the contemporary humanities back down to Earth. Moving from social to planetary history, he has challenged historians to recognize that the significance of their work cannot be confined to the past alone. His writings have fundamentally reshaped the ways in which we problematize and interpret the present.
Drawing on philosophical reflection and the historical experience of the Global South, Chakrabarty argues that the teleological and Eurocentric narrative of progress and emancipation was never an autonomous or universal process. Instead, he advances a planetary perspective attentive to the operations of capital and the enduring structures of colonial power. In his more recent work, Chakrabarty emphasizes that humanity has profoundly transformed the conditions of planetary existence, exerting long-term effects on the Earth system itself. In his books he decentrers the privileged position of human agency in history and invites renewed reflection on politics, responsibility, and freedom from a perspective that exceeds the exclusively human point of view. From this perspective, planetary consciousness reveals both the limitations of the nation-state and the ambivalent role of the global capitalism. His understanding of political time ultimately compels us to conceive of “universal history” as a material phenomenon—an actual limit confronting our civilization.
Chakrabarty is the recipient of the Toynbee Prize and has been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of London, the University of Antwerp, and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Among his most influential books are Rethinking Working-Class History (Princeton, 1989), Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000), The Crises of Civilization: Exploring Global and Planetary Histories (Oxford, 2018), The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago, 2021), and One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax (2023).
