- Phone:
- 812-855-6286
- Email:
- msdodson@indiana.edu
- Website:
- https://global.iu.edu
- Department:
- Global Gateways
- Office:
- Office of the Vice President for International Affairs
- Campus:
- IU
Biography
Michael S. Dodson is academic director of the IU India Gateway, director of the Dhar India Studies Program, and an associate professor of history at Indiana University Bloomington. He is a historian of northern India, focusing particularly upon the intellectual and cultural history of that region during the nineteenth century.
His first book, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India 1770–1880 (2007), is a reinterpretation of Orientalism that conceptualizes colonial scholarly practices in northern India as highly localized, with links not only to the East India Company’s governing authority, but also to the consolidation of the sociocultural authority of Sanskrit pandits.
He is the editor of Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural Histories (2012), a collection of essays and photographs on the recent history of that north Indian city, and co-editor, with Brian Hatcher, of Trans-colonial Modernities in South Asia (2012). He has also published widely in journals such as Modern Asian Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and Modern Intellectual History.
He is currently writing A History of South Asia: Culture, Politics, Society, and Architecture 1000-2000 for Oxford University Press and a research monograph on urban landscapes and municipal governance in north India ca. 1880–1920.
He has worked extensively in the archives and libraries of India, and when he’s not in Bloomington or Delhi, he spends as much time as he can in the north Indian city of Varanasi.
