After earning his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Vinay Lal accepted a position at Columbia University. There he was a William R. Kenan Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Humanities. Lal joined the history faculty at UCLA in Fall 1993 and is now Associate Professor. He has since held several fellowships, including a Senior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers, and a fellowship from the Society for the Promotion of Science/Japan Area Studies Center at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka.

Lal writes on a wide variety of subjects for periodicals in the US, India, and Britain, including the Economic and Political Weekly (Mumbai), The Little Magazine (Delhi), and Social Scientist (Delhi). Lengthier scholarly articles have appeared in such journals as Diaspora, Social Text, Genders, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Environmental Ethics, History and Theory, and Studies in History. His most recent books include The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (Oxford, 2003), Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi: Essays on Indian History and Culture (Seagull Press, 2003), The Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (London: Pluto, 2002), Introducing Hinduism (with Borin van Loon, London: Icon, 2005), and (co-edited with Ashis Nandy) The Future of Knowledge and Culture: A Dictionary for the Twenty-first Century (Viking/Penguin, 2005).