Sudipta Sen

Sudipta Sen, Professor of History and current Director of the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program, University of California, Davis, is a historian of late Mughal and early British India and the British Empire. Sen has taught at Beloit College WI, University of California, Berkeley, and Syracuse University, NY. A former Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research fellow and Senior Fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities, in 2000 he won the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award for his contribution to research and teaching at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University NY.
Sen’s work has largely focused on the early history of British expansion in India. He is the author of Empire of Free Trade: The English East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) and Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (Routledge, 2002).
His most recent book Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River (Yale University Press, 2018) is an exploration of the idea of a cosmic, universal river at the interstices of myth, history, landscape and ecology. He is now finishing a book on the history of law, crime and punishment in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century British India.
Sen is an avid cook and enthusiastic musician of modest ability (congas, guitar, keyboard). He is working on his Arabic (still intermediate level) and a book of short stories, which will likely be published without footnotes or a bibliography.