David Kopf

David Kopf is professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota. A research scholar on South Asian history, he has produced several books on the region. He has won the Guggenheim Fellowship at the University.[1]

A Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago, his first book, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance was one of the three books selected for the Watumull Prize as the best monograph on South Asia published in the US in 1969–70.[2]

He is the coauthor of Comparative History of Civilisation in South Asia, published in 1977. In between he published a major paper on The Problems of Modernisation in South Asia, published in the Duke University anthology in 1970. He visited India and East Pakistan (currently Bangladesh) for two years in 1971–72 to study the Brahmo Samaj and published a book, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind in 1979 by Princeton University Press.[2] He has published numerous research papers, and lectured at the South Asian departments of many universities, including those in Australia. In the winter of 1984, Kopf was a visiting Professor in the Department of History at the University of Calcutta. In the same year he was invited as a delegate to the International Seminar commemorating the Bicentenary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Kolkata.[2]