The Climate of History in a Planetary Age

“The idea of anthropogenic and planetary climate change does not face much academic challenge these days, but the idea of the Anthropocene has been much debated by both scientists and humanist scholars,” Dipesh Chakrabarty writes in his new book, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (University of Chicago Press, 2021). To fully understand the present moment, he argues, we must make a conceptual shift in the way we orient ourselves to both the global, a human-centric construction, and to “a new historical-philosophical entity called the planet,” which intentionally decenters the human. At this event, Chakrabarty joined a panel of scholars at the forefront of exploring the implications of the Anthropocene framework for historical research to discuss how climate change upends long-standing ideas of history, modernity, and globalization.

This event was co-sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, the Seminary Co-op Bookstores, the University of Chicago Graham School, and the University of Chicago Press, and organized as part of the University of Chicago’s Environmental Research and Sustainability initiative.