Nicholas Dirks

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Nicholas Dirks

Nicholas Dirks is the Franz Boas Profressor of History and Anthropology at Columbia University, dean of the university's faculty, and Vice President of its Arts and Sciences division. Dirks is the author of numerous books on South Asian history and culture, primarily concerned with the impact of British colonial rule. His most famous works include The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (1987), Castes of Mind (2001), and Scandal of Empire (2006). In these works Dirks has advanced research on how the character of British rule shaped the Indian subcontinent to come, as well as how Britain's development came to be influenced by its colonies.

Dirks was born in Iowa but grew up in New Haven, where his father was a professor at Yale University. When the latter received a Fulbright scholarship in 1963, the Dirks family relocated to Madras, where Nicholas' interest in Indian culture first formed. He attended Wesleyan, from which he received a B.A. in 1972, and the University of Chicago, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1981, and where he came under the influence of historical anthropologist Bernard Cohn. During this period he habitually returned for research purposes to South India. After teaching at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan, Dirks was summoned to Columbia in 1997 to rebuild its struggling anthropology department, which he achieved through a variety of skillful appointments, a strategy he has come to employ to bolster the rest of the university. Dirks, who is married to Columbia history professor Janaki Bakhle, lives in New York City.