India China Institute in Partnership with Historical Studies of The New School for Social Research, delivers the annual Carol Breckenridge memorial lecture in south Asian history. The lecture, titled “Unimagining Communities- Suspicion and the Writing of History in Post-Colonial Societies” will be presented by Prof. Dilip Menon, the Mellon Chair of Indian Studies and the Director of the Centre for Indian Studies at the University of Witwatersrand in Africa. Prof. Menon was educated at the Universities of Delhi, Oxford and Cambridge. His research for the past decade has engaged with issues of caste, socialism and equality in modern India. Currently, he is working on issues of cultural and intellectual history and is engaged in a project on the writing of history in India between 1850 and 1960. The work inaugurated at the Centre is interdisciplinary and transnational in approach and looks afresh at issues of colonialism, modernity and migration in the Global South.
Carol Breckenridge (1942-2009), a historian and scholar of global culture, brought along with her to different cities and campuses not only her erudition and insight into intellectual debates on global and transnational issues, but also her formidable gift of inspiring others through a rare combination of charm, generosity of spirit, hospitality and hard work.The journal Public Culture which she founded in 1988 with her husband and soulmate Arjun Appadurai, the later Sister Cities Project, and the articles and books she wrote and co-edited with colleagues, have brought new perceptions to the field and remain as evidence on her unstinting efforts against the stultifying effects of academic parochialism on the world at large. At The New School for Social Research and at other universities where Carol and Arjun have lived and taught, Breckenridge will be remembered for the way she personified these very commitments by her concern and care for her junior colleagues and students.

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