UCLA history professor Sanjay Subrahmanyam was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium. During the ceremony on Monday, Feb. 6, the university honored Subrahmanyam and two others whose boundary-pushing work characterized them as true scientific adventurers.
Belgium’s Université honored Subrahmanyam for his development of the concept of global history, or connected history, which has been widely popularized in academic communities. Rather than compare civilizations, practitioners of connected history seek to demonstrate how civilizations interact with one another over time.
Subrahmanyam holds the Irving and Jean Stone endowed chair in social sciences at UCLA and, from 2005 to 2011, served as founding director of UCLA’s Center of India and South Asia.
At UCLA, Subrahmanyam teaches courses on medieval and early modern South Asian and Indian Ocean history, focusing on the history of European expansion, the comparative history of early modern empires and world history. He advises graduate students on Indian history, the history of the Iberian empires and general forms of connected history.
