William Pinch’s research addresses the following themes:

• Asceticism, the nation, and state formation in South Asia
• Military culture and war, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
• The intersection of maritime history, world history, and environmental history
• theory and philosophy of history

He is currently working on three projects:

1) a translation, with two colleagues at Columbia University, of two long eighteenth-century Hindi poems celebrating the military and political career of the warlord Anupgiri Gosain, a.k.a. “Himmat Bahadur” (d. 1804)

2) a study of the gender and sexual politics that shaped the violence of 1857

3) an examination of the immediate aftermath and local perceptions of the Battle of Panipat in 1761, in collaboration with a colleague at Delhi University

He 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.

Books:

• 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