"The Meaning of Climate Change": Dipesh Chakrabarty in conversation with Travis Holloway

For the past decade, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has been one of the most influential scholars addressing the meaning of climate change. Climate change, he argues, upends long-standing ideas of history, modernity, and globalization. It is time to grapple with what this means and to confront humanities scholars with ideas they have been reluctant to reconsider – from the changed nature of human agency to a new acceptance of universals.

In conversation with philosopher and poet Travis Holloway, Chakrabarty discusses his wonderful new book "The Climate of History in a Planetary Age", exploring what it means to think from a planetary perspective, and why such a perspective is necessary for thinking and acting through our highly uncertain and disoriented times.

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Prize, which is given to a distinguished practitioner of global history. One of the world’s foremost thinkers of the Anthropocene, Chakrabarty’s new book, "The Climate of History in a Planetary Ag", was published this year by Chicago University Press.

Travis Holloway is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Farmingdale and currently a visiting faculty member at the Pratt Institute. He is also a translator, a poet, and former Goldwater Fellow in Creative Writing at NYU. His primary interests are Contemporary European Philosophy, Aesthetics, Social and Political Philosophy, Queer Theory, and the Environmental Humanities. He is currently writing a book about genealogy and the Anthropocene.