Academic
He studied at St. Xavier's Collegiate School, Calcutta and Presidency College, Calcutta. In college he was a student of Professor Susobhan Chandra Sarkar. After his graduation he went to St Catherine's Society, Oxford to complete a second B.A. in History and later obtained an M.A. from the University of Oxford. From 1957 to 1958 he taught as Lecturer in history at the University of Calcutta. He completed his D.Phil. in Indian history at Nuffield College, Oxford in 1961. While he was completing his thesis he was a Tutor at Nuffield College. His Oxford thesis, completed under the supervision of Dr. C.C.Davies, was entitled Henry Dundas and the Government of India, (1773–1801): A Study in Constitutional Ideas. He was Reader in History at the University of Burdwan from 1961 to 1963. From 1965 to 1969 and then again from 1971 to 1973 he was Senior Professor of Social and Economic History of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIM Calcutta). In the intervening period between 1969 and 1971 he was a Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Simla. From 1973 to 1993 he was Professor of History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC). He was the UGC National Lecturer in 1981. From 1997 to 1998 he was the Maulana Azad Fellow at the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Calcutta. From 1998 to 2001 he was the India Chair at the University of World Economy and Diplomacy, Tashkent, Uzbekistan. From 2010 to 2012 he will be the Ministry of Culture, Government of India's Tagore National Fellow at the Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta.
He has taught as Visiting Professor and Visiting Associate Professor and has held Directeurships at universities and institutes at Duke, Paris, Milan, Sydney and Tokyo.
He has delivered a number of chaired lectures. Some of them are: Devraj Chanana Memorial Lecture (Delhi) (1974), UGC National Lectures (Burdwan, North Bengal University, Siliguri, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) (1979), D.D. Kosambi Memorial Lectures (Goa University) (1993), Khuda Buksh Memorial Lecture (Khuda Buksh Memorial Library, Patna) (2007), Heras Memorial Lecture (St. Xavier's College, Mumbai) (2008), The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland Lecture (National Museum of Scotland) (2009) and the Foundation Day Lecture of Presidency College, Calcutta (2010).
Famous quotes containing the word academic:
“I was so grateful to be independent of the academic establishment. I thought, how awful it would be to have my future hinge on such people and such decisions.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)
“If we focus exclusively on teaching our children to read, write, spell, and count in their first years of life, we turn our homes into extensions of school and turn bringing up a child into an exercise in curriculum development. We should be parents first and teachers of academic skills second.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)