Professor Pinch is currently finalizing a book-length study of the social and emotional world of Indian soldiers in the Bengal army (the “Company Fauj“) in mid-nineteenth-century north India, beginning with the tumultuous events of April and May 1857 in Meerut, entitled From Mutiny to Revolt: Women and the Beginning of 1857 (forthcoming, Cambridge 2025). In 2024 he and Dalpat Rajpurohit finished revisions to a joint translation of the Himmatbahādur Vīrdāvalī by Padmākar (the first draft completed with the late Allison Busch), a long eighteenth-century Hindi (Brajbhāṣā) poem celebrating a 1792 victory by the warlord Anūpgirī Gosāīṃ, a.k.a. “Himmat Bahādur” (d. 1804). This is forthcoming from Harvard in the Murty Classical Library of India in 2026.
Pinch is the author of numerous book chapters, essays, and reviews, as well as articles in History and Theory, Past & Present, Modern Asian Studies, and Indian Economic and Social History Review.
Some recent and forthcoming articles include:
- “Panipat Remembered: Before the Fort of Kalinjar, August 23, 1803,” in Peter Gottschalk (ed.), Hindu, Muslim, and the Dynamics of South Asian Identity: Belonging and Conflict from the Past to the Present (London: Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming 2025), approx. 15 pp.
- “Killing Ascetics: Yogis, Sufis, and the Raj,” in David Gilmartin, Prasannan Parthasarathi, and Mrinalini Sinha (eds.), Cambridge History of the Indian Subcontinent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2025), approx. 20 pp.
- “History and Hindi Film,” in Kim Nelson, Mia Treacey, and Marnie Hughes-Warrington (eds.), A Companion to History and Film (New York: Routledge, 2023), 176-193.
- “Who Killed Arjun Singh? Poetry and History in Bundelkhand,” in Manan Ahmed (ed.), “Circuits of Culture in Early Modern South Asia: Essays in Honor of Allison Busch,” special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 42, 2 (August 2022), pp. 370-380
- “Rajo guṇa: Sovereignty and the Self in India,” in Dilip Menon (ed.), Concepts in the Global South (New York, London, New Delhi: Routledge, 2022), pp. 151-166
- “Blown Away: The Prelude to Buxar, 1764,” in Kathinka Sinha Kerkhoff, Neeraj Kumar, and Sunita Lall (eds.), Coming of Age in Bihar: Readings in Social Sciences (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2020), pp. 237-253
- “The Yogi’s Way of War,” in Robert Antony, Stuart Carroll, and Caroline Dodds Pennock (eds.), Philip Dwyer (gen. ed.), The Cambridge World History of Violence, vol. 3, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 156-173
Pinch served as an associate editor of History and Theory from 2012 to 2021 and continues to serve as a consulting editor for the journal.
And he has authored two books, edited one festschrift, and co-edited one theme issue for History and Theory:
- Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; paperback edition, 2012)
- Peasants and Monks in British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996; Delhi: Oxford India Paperbacks, 1999)
- Speaking of Peasants: Essays in Indian History and Politics in Honor of Walter Hauser (New Delhi: Manohar, 2008), edited festschrift volume
- History and Theory in a Global Frame, co-edited with Ethan Kleinberg, History and Theory, theme issue no. 53, December 2015 (vol. 54, issue no. 4)
