Anirban Karak is a comparative historian of global capitalism with a focus on the relationship between caste conflict, commercialization, and the organization of labor in South Asia. His first monograph in progress, titled Subaltern Aspirations: Poetry, History, and Caste Struggle in Bengal, c.1550-1859, shows that new aspirations to transcend the constraints imposed by caste hierarchies emerged at this time. These aspirations found plausibility not only due to regional cultural movements and transformations in subcontinental politics but also due to the entanglement of South Asia in increasingly global commercial networks from the sixteenth century onwards. Using both colonial records and devotional poetry in the vernacular Bangla, Karak shows how subaltern peasants, poets, artisans, rural slaves, and petty merchants insisted that commerce should be free from arbitrary impositions by upper-caste elites and states, that everyone should have a property right over their bodies and labor, that the labor of lower-caste peasants should give them a property right in the soil, and that worldly labor undifferentiated by caste rather than by caste-ascribed duties inherited by birth would mediate the relationship between the secular and the divine.

Karak studied economics in India and at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, before completing his PhD in history from New York University. He is also a violinist and an avid soccer fan.