Biography

Sanjay Subrahmanyam holds the Irving and Jean Stone Chair in Social Sciences at the Department of History in UCLA, where he has been since 2004. Educated in Delhi, he has taught earlier at Delhi, the EHESS (Paris) and Oxford. An early modern historian with wide geographic interests, his recent publications include Writing the Mughal World (2011, with Muzaffar Alam), Three Ways to be an Alien (2011), Courtly Encounters (2012), and most recently Europe’s India (2016). He also holds a long-term visiting professorship at the Collège de France (Paris).

Project Summary

“Urban Hubs in the Early Modern World” is a project still in the phase of development. Its first incarnation was a series of six lectures delivered at the Collège de France in early 2017. My intention is to consider both commercial and administrative cities, and range widely across the Indian Ocean, Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds, using examples such as Surat, Istanbul, Lisbon, Genoa, Luanda and Rio de Janeiro. In the time spent at Villa I Tatti, I wish to explore the interface between urban history and the emerging (and highly contested) field of “global intellectual history”.