Gyanendra PandeyArts & Sciences Distinguished Professor

Gyanendra Pandey (B.A. Hons, University of Delhi; D.Phil., University of Oxford)
Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor, and Director, Interdisciplinary Workshop on Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Emory University.

Before moving to Emory, Pandey taught at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, the University of Delhi, and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, among other places. He has also been a visiting professor at universities and research institutions in India, the UK, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia and the USA.

A founding member and leading theorist of the Subaltern Studies project, Pandey has focused his research on South Asia and the USA. Among the best known of his single-authored works are A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste and Difference in India and the United States (2013); Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (2006); The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (rev. ed. 2006); and Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (2001).

At Emory, Pandey has worked actively to develop a dialogue between historians and social scientists working on the North and the South. He has organized international, interdisciplinary workshops around questions of marginality, subalternity and difference, unarchived histories, and the practice of democracy. Publications following from the workshops include a specially edited guest issue of the postcolonial studies journal, Interventions (2008); and three major edited anthologies, Subaltern Citizens and their Histories: Investigations from India and the USA (2010), Subalternity and Difference: Investigations from the North and the South (2011), and Un-archived Histories: the “Mad” and the “Trifling” (2014).

Pandey’s latest book, Fragments of Family: Men at Home in Colonial and Postcolonial India, is due to appear in 2024. Pandey is currently working on a book on politics and democracy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in which India and the USA serve as primary examples.