Prem Poddar is currently Senior Research Associate at the Centre for World Environmental History at University of Sussex. He had a 6-month stint as founding Vice-Chancellor of the Darjeeling Hills University.
He was Professor in Cultural Encounters at Rosklide University in Denmark for a decade. Prior to that he was an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Fellow in Berlin, Carlsberg Senior Fellow at Cambridge University. He was a Visiting Professor at Fudan University in China, Confucius Senior Fellow in Shanghai, and Visiting Professor in Heidelberg University. He has taught in India, Britain, and in two universities in Denmark: as Associate Professor in Postcolonial Studies and Professor in Cultural Encounters.
He is the author of many articles and books including Violent Civilities (2002), Postkolonial Contra-modernitet: Immigration, Identitet, Historie (2004), and Invented Futures: Fin de Siècle Fantasies (2016) which has recently been revised and updated in Chinese and published as Cengjing de weilai 曾经的未来 (Imaged Futures) (2023). He has also edited Translating Nations (2000); A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Thought (2005/2008), Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective (2007/2010); A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures — Continental Europe and its Empires (2008/2011) and Gorkhas Imagined (2009).
His monograph China in India: Himalayan Kalimpong from Cambridge University Press was published in 2024 and investigates India-Tibet-China interactions through the optic of borders in the eastern Himalayas. His continuing interest in ‘state’ and ‘nation’ as conceptual contexts for analysing cultural representation forms the centre of his forthcoming work on the Politics of the Passport.