Vanita Seth

About

Professor Vanita Seth is a member of the faculty in the Politics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The department is part of the Social Sciences Division and is committed to scholarly excellence and social impact. Faculty members, including Professor Seth, have been recognized with multiple teaching awards and prestigious fellowships from organizations such as the Guggenheim Foundation. They actively share their research through top academic journals and conferences and participate in globally important policy efforts, including organizing for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The department fosters a vibrant community of faculty, staff, and graduate students dedicated to innovative research and teaching in the field of politics.

Research topics

• Sociology
• History
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Art
• Political Science
• Literature
• Aesthetics
• Law
• Geography

Selected publications

• Europe's Indians

  2010-01-01 · 113 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Europe's Indians forces a rethinking of key assumptions regarding difference—particularly racial difference—and its centrality to contemporary social and political theory. Tracing shifts in European representations of two different colonial spaces, the New World and India, from the late fifteenth century through the late nineteenth, Vanita Seth demonstrates that the classification of humans into racial categories or binaries of self–other is a product of modernity. Part historical, part philosop…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• THE ORIGINS OF RACISM: A CRITIQUE OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

  History and Theory · 2020 · 55 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT This essay has two objectives. First, it seeks to engage critically with contemporary scholarship on the origins of racism through the lens of an older debate centered around the history of ideas. Specifically, it argues that Quentin Skinner's influential critique of the history of ideas can help identify the pitfalls of our current fascination with the origins of racism—most particularly when such origins are traced back to antiquity and the European pre‐ and early modern periods. In p…

  PublisherDOI

• Difference with a Difference: Wild Men, Gods and Other Protagonists

  Parallax · 2003-10-01 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Europe's Indians

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• (UN)DOING HISTORY: A CASE FOR EPISTEMOLOGICAL ALTERITY

  History and Theory · 2023 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT This article addresses two primary tensions that currently beset medieval history. The first concerns a contentious debate within the field regarding the relative merits of two interpretative approaches: that which seeks to situate the Middle Ages within a narrative of continuity wherein aspects of the medieval bear some relationship of familiarity with the present and that which accords a radical alterity to the past that instigates moments of historical rupture. The second tension con…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Christopher Connery

  3 shared

• Katherine Fatma

  New York University Press

  1 shared

• Nancy Rose Hunt

  1 shared

• Müge Göcek

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  1 shared

• Mamadou Diouf

  Columbia University

  1 shared

• Julia Adams

  1 shared

• Margaret R. Somers

  1 shared

• Julie Skurski

  The Graduate Center, CUNY

  1 shared

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