Sanjay Subrahmanyam, UCLA Distinguished Professor of History and Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair in Social Sciences, will receive an honorary D.Litt. (Doctor of Letters) from the University of Calcutta. The degree will be conferred during the university's Annual Convocation of the Senate on Dec. 9.
Educated at the University of Delhi, where he earned a Ph.D. in economics in 1982, Subrahmanyam taught economic history and comparative economic development at the Delhi School of Economics, where he was named Professor of Economic History, until 1995. He went on to serve as directeur d’études in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris until 2002, holding a position on the economic and social history of early modern India and the Indian Ocean world. In 2002, he was appointed as the first holder of the newly created Chair in Indian History and Culture at the University of Oxford.
Subrahmanyam joined UCLA in 2004 and served as founding director of UCLA's Center for India and South Asia from 2005 to 2011. He teaches courses on medieval and early modern South Asian and Indian Ocean history; the history of European expansion, the comparative history of early modern empires, and world history. He advises graduate students on Indian history, the history of the Iberian empires, and more generally on forms of “connected histories.”
In 2013, Subrahmanyam was elected to a Chair in Early Modern Global History at the Collège de France in Paris, where he delivered a full series of lectures from 2013-14 and has since continued to serve as a long-term visiting professor. He was joint managing editor of the Indian Economic and Social History Review for over a decade, and he has also served on the boards of a number of other journals in the United States, the U.K., France, Portugal and elsewhere.
