Sunil Amrith

Sunil Amrith

Member of the Advisory Council
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Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University. He is currently on leave from his role as chair of the South Asian Studies Council, which he will resume in fall 2022. His research focuses on the movements of people and the ecological processes that have connected South and Southeast Asia. Amrith’s areas of particular interest include environmental history, the history of migration, and the history of public health. He is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow, and recipient of the 2016 Infosys Prize in Humanities.

Amrith’s most recent book is Unruly Waters (Basic Books and Penguin UK), a history of the struggle to understand and control the monsoon in modern South Asia. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Cundill Prize, and was reviewed in Nature, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Review of Books. His previous book, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Harvard University Press, 2013) was awarded the American Historical Association’s John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History in 2014, and was selected as an Editor’s Choice title by the New York Times Book Review. He is also the author of Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Decolonizing International Health: South and Southeast Asia, 1930-1965 (Palgrave, 2006), as well as articles in journals including the American Historical Review, Past and Present, The Lancet and Economic and Political Weekly. Amrith serves on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and Modern Asian Studies, and he is one of the series editors of the Princeton University Press book series, Histories of Economic Life.

Amrith is currently writing The Ruins of Freedom, an environmental history of the modern world to be published by W.W. Norton and Allen Lane.

 

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