Dina, me, and Mohona, celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary.

I am Emeritus Professor of History at New York University and at the University of Pennsylvania. I joined the Penn faculty in 1981 and came to NYU in 2007. I chaired South Asia programs at Penn, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright Senior Scholars program (CIES), and NYU. I served as President of the Association for Asian Studies and as Chair of the NYU Department of History. I founded the NYU Global Asia Program. My research and teaching focus broadly on South Asia, globalization, and capitalism.

I now focus on writing and on developing research material for global Asian studies: see the Global Asia Resource Portal and Oxford University Press Online Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, where I am Editor-in-Chief. 

Here is my NYU History Department homepage. Here is a short bio. My updated CV and links to published and unpublished work are under the the LIBRARY tab. My old Penn homepage is still live but most ot is links are dead: one useful thing is the Hindutva page (the Penn Hindutva archive is copied here.) 

Recent Blog Posts

Global Asia

This is the first post in a new blog series that I am launching after my retirement from NYU, to continue my Global Asia Program work as an independent author. It will present opinion pieces and academic essays. Here goes. The NYU Global Asia Program has brought...

Pandemic World History Syllabus

    Pandemic World History Draft 1 Oct 2023 J-Term Schedule 2024  Faculty arrive: January 2, 2024 (Tuesday) Required Faculty Orientation: January 3, 2024 (Wednesday) Classes start: January 4, 2024...

Some Global Asia Maps

Roman Empire Indian Ocean Connections to Asian Trade: The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea Turkic Migrations (550-1200). In 552 a powerful new Turkic confederacy developed in the Altai Mountains. It spread from China to the Caspian Sea, pushing Bulgarian and Slav nomad...

On Colonialism and Empire

On "colonialism versus empire" as frames for modern South Asian History. "Colonialism" literally refers to an ideology or process of producing and maintaining colonies; it seems to be applied exclusively to European colonies, going back to Greek and Roman times, when...

AI in education

AI is a tool inside capitalism to replace human labor with machinery. Using it and trying to control it politically is part of our struggle to survive/thrive in the context of increasing control of our world by investors in capital accumulation. Keeping that reality...

David Ludden