Rate My Professor Vinay Lal

Vinay Lal is a Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), with a joint appointment in Asian American Studies. Born in Delhi and raised in India, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States, he earned a B.A. from the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University in 1982, concentrating in literature, history, and philosophy, followed by an M.A. from the same institution for a thesis on Emerson and Indian Philosophy. He received a Ph.D. with Distinction from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 1992; his dissertation, “Committees of Inquiry and Discourses of ‘Law and Order’ in Twentieth-Century British India,” won the Marc Galler Award for the best dissertation in the Division of the Humanities. After serving as William R. Kenan Fellow and Lecturer in History at Columbia University in 1992-93, Lal joined UCLA's History faculty in fall 1993. He later directed the University of California’s Education Abroad Program in India for 18 months, served as Professor of History at the University of Delhi in 2010-11, and was appointed India Academic (Humanities) Delegate to the Oxford University Press Board in 2022 for a three-year term, renewed for 2025-28. Recently, he held a fellowship at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in 2024 and a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship for Academic and Professional Excellence.

Lal’s research specializations encompass South and Southeast Asia, world history, historiography, and history and theory, including political and legal history of colonial India, popular Hindi film, the Indian diaspora, Gandhi’s thought, genocide, and global politics of knowledge systems. He teaches undergraduate courses on British India, contemporary South Asia, the Indian diaspora, Gandhi’s moral and political thought, and world history, alongside graduate seminars on postcolonial theory, politics of knowledge, and comparative oppression. Author and editor of twenty-two books, key works include Insurgency and the Artist: The Art of the Freedom Struggle in India (2022), The Fury of Covid-19 (2020), Deewaar: The Footpath, the City, and the Angry Young Man (2011), The Other Indians: Politics and Culture of South Asians in America (2007), Introducing Hinduism (2005), The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (2003), and Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (2002). His scholarship, cited by over 2,400 scholars, has been translated into multiple languages. Awards include Senior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers, and election as Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science in 2000. Lal has contributed to over 250 publications, editorial series, and initiatives like Multiversity and the Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics, advancing decolonization of knowledge systems and nonviolent thought.