Asiatic Society Honors UC Davis India Scholar
Sudipta Sen, a professor of history and Middle East/South Asian studies, was recently awarded a Sir Williams Jones Memorial Medal from the Asiatic Society of India for his influential work on the history of South Asia.
The medal is named for the British India scholar and judge who founded the learned society in 1784.
Sen is a historian of the late Mughal and early British India and the British Empire, and of the environment.
His medal comes a year after he received a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship from the United States-India Educational Foundation for a new research project: “The Making of Puppet Nabobs: Reinvention of Sovereignty in Early British India.”
His 2018 book Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River, explores the idea of a cosmic, universal river at the interstices of myth, historical geography and ecology. It was a finalist for an ICAS Book Prize from the International Convention of Asia Scholars.
He also wrote Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India and Empire of Free Trade: The English East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace.
He is co-editor of a forthcoming collection of essays, Terra Aqua: The Amphibious Lifeworlds of Coastal and Maritime South Asia, and is working on a book manuscript, "Lawless Subjects: Crime and Punishment in Early British-India."
— Kathleen Holder, content strategist in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science