Vinay Lal is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Lal studied history, literature, and philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University, before earning his doctorate from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He has also taught at Columbia University and the University of Delhi. He is the author or editor of twenty books, eight of them from OUP, and his writings span a vast canvas of modern Indian and colonial history, historiography, public culture, global politics, cinema, political psychology, and the politics of knowledge systems.