Saurabh Dube

Dube’s research explores questions of colonialism and modernity, law and legalities, caste and community, evangelization and empire, and popular religion and subaltern art. Apart from more than one hundred and thirty journal articles and book chapters as well as a few dozen reviews/discussion-pieces, his authored books in English include Untouchable Pasts (State University of New York Press, 1998; reprint Sage, 2001); Stitches on Time (Duke University Press and Oxford University Press, 2004); After Conversion (Yoda Press, 2009); Subjects of Modernity (Manchester University Press, 2017 [Hardback and Open Access] and 2019 [Paperback]; SUNMeDIA/STIAS, 2017 [South Africa]; Primus Books, 2018 [South Asia]). Dube has authored as well a quintet in historical anthropology in the Spanish language comprising Sujetos subalternos (2001), Genealogías del presente (2003), Historias esparcidas (2007), Modernidad e Historia (2011, second edition 2019), and Formaciones de lo contemporaneo (2017), published by El Colegio de México. A 600-page anthology of his writings in Spanish of the last twenty years, El archivo y el campo: Historia, antropología, modernidad was published in 2019 also by El Colegio de México. Among Dube's more than fifteen edited and co-edited volumes are Postcolonial Passages (Oxford University Press, 2004); Historical Anthropology (Oxford University Press, 2007); Enchantments of Modernity (Routledge, 2009); Ancient to Modern (Oxford University Press, 2009); Modern Makeovers (Oxford University Press, 2011); Crime through Time (Oxford University Press, 2013); Unbecoming Modern (second edition, Routledge, 2019); and Dipesh Chakrabarty and the Global South (Routledge, 2020). Dube also currently edits the innovative international series "Routledge Focus on Modern Subjects" (London, New York, and New Delhi).

Saurabh Dube is an Indian scholar whose work combines history and anthropology, archival and field research, subaltern studies and postcolonial-decolonial perspectives, and social theory and critical thought. After teaching at the University of Delhi, since 1995 he is Professor of History – elected to the Distinguished Category of Professor-Researcher in 2009 – at the Centre of Asian and African Studies at El Colegio de México in Mexico City. Dube is a member also of the National System of Researchers (SNI), Mexico, in which since 2005 he holds the highest rank.

Dube was born to anthropologist parents, S.C. Dube and Leela Dube. He received the BA (Honours) and MA degrees in History from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi; an MPhil (1988) from the University of Delhi; and a PhD (1992) from the University of Cambridge. Dube has held visiting professorships several times at institutions such as Cornell University, the University of Iowa, and the Johns Hopkins University. He has been elected fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York; the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla; the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick; the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study, South Africa; the Max Weber Kolleg, Erfurt, Germany; and the Institute of the Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna, Austria. He is married to fellow cultural historian, Ishita Banerjee. Both Dube and Ishita Banerjee were elected to the prestigious D.D. Kosambi [Visiting] Research Professorship in Interdisciplinary Studies (2017-2019) of Goa University in India, a Chair previously held by Romila Thapar, Sudhir Kakar, Madhav Gadgil, and Shahid Amin.