Rudrangshu Mukherjee is a renowned Indian historian and the Chancellor and Professor of History at Ashoka University. He was awarded a D.Phil in Modern History by the University of Oxford in 1981 and taught History at the University of Calcutta. His first book, Awadh in Revolt, 1857-58: A Study of Popular Resistance (1984) is a pioneering work on the 1857 rebellion, which is a crucial and controversial subject in Indian history. Mukherjee is internationally acclaimed as a historian of the revolt of 1857 in India and he has looked at the 1857 rebellion in four other books: Spectre of Violence: The 1857 Kanpur Massacres (1998), Mangal Pandey: Brave Martyr or Accidental Hero? (2005), Dateline 1857: Revolt against the Raj (2008) and The Year of Blood: Essays on 1857 (2014). His most recent works are Twilight Falls on Liberalism (2018) and Oxford India Short Introduction: Jawaharlal Nehru (2018).