Sunil Amrith

Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History and current chair of the South Asian Studies Council. 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 is the author of four books, including Unruly Waters, shortlisted for the 2019 Cundill Prize, and Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants, which was awarded the American Historical Association’s John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History in 2014. Amrith serves on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and Modern Asian Studies. Before coming to Yale, Amrith was the inaugural Mehra Family Professor of South Asian History at Harvard University from 2015-2020, where he also served as co-director of the Joint Center for History and Economics and Interim Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center (in 2019-2020). From 2006-2015, he taught at Birkbeck College at the University of London.