Portrait of Dilip Menon

Science Breakthrough

University of Witwatersrand

Dilip Menon

  • 2024
  • Jury
  • Social Sciences & Humanities
  • 2023
  • Jury
  • Social Sciences & Humanities
  • 2021
  • Speaker
  • Social Sciences & Humanities
  • 2018
  • Jury
  • Social Sciences & Humanities

Currently a Professor of History and International Relations, University at the University of Witwatersrand, Dilip Menon was educated at Delhi, Oxford and Cambridge. He is a historian of ideas and his research focuses on oceanic histories and epistemologies of the global south. He has worked collaboratively with scholars from Africa, Asia, and Latin America to develop a conceptual vocabulary for the social sciences from traditions of intellection in these spaces. He works with the idea of paracoloniality; of what always exceeded the colonial encounter in the making of the modern world. Dilip Menon’s latest publications include Ocean as Method: Thinking with the Maritime, Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South, and Cinemas of the Global South: Towards a Southern Aesthetics. 

Dilip Menon was the Science Breakthrough in the Social Sciences & Humanities category at the Science Summit in 2021.