Sunil Amrith

Sunil S. Amrith (born 4 September 1979)^[1][2] is a historian who is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University. His research interests include transnational migration in South and Southeast Asia.^[3]

Sunil Amrith
Born	(1979-09-04) 4 September 1979 (age 45) Kenya
Awards	2016  Infosys Prize in Humanities 2017  MacArthur Fellowship
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Cambridge
Academic work
Institutions	University of Cambridge University of London Harvard University Yale University

Amrith was born in Kenya to parents from Tamil Nadu, India, and he was raised in Singapore. He received his postsecondary education and later his doctorate at the University of Cambridge, and then taught at Birkbeck, University of London until 2015, when he became a professor of South Asian history at Harvard University.^[3][4] He also co-directed the Joint Center for History and Economics between Harvard and the University of Cambridge and was interim director of Harvard's Mahindra Humanities Center.^[3] In 2020, Yale University announced that they had appointed Amrith as a professor of history.^[5]

Amrith was awarded the 2016 Infosys Prize in Humanities for contributions to the fields of the history of migration, environmental history, the history of international public health, and the history of contemporary Asia.^[6] He became a MacArthur Fellow in 2017.^[2] Amrith has authored several nonfiction books: Unruly Waters, which studies the influence of water on the political and economic development of the Indian subcontinent,^[7] was shortlisted for the 2019 Cundill History Prize.^[8] In 2022, he won the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History.^[9]

Works

• Amrith, Sunil S. (2006). Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia, 1930–65. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781403985934; xiii+261 pages{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)^[10]
• Amrith, Sunil S. (2011). Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521727020; xviii+216 pages{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)^[11]
• Amrith, Sunil S. (2013). Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674287242.^[12][13]
• Harper, Tim N.; Amrith, Sunil S., eds. (2014). Sites of Asian Interaction: Ideas, Networks and Mobility. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139979474. ISBN 9781139979474.
• Amrith, Sunil S. (2018). Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts and Seas Have Shaped Asia's History. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 9780465097739.^[14]
• Amrith, Sunil S. (2024). The Burning Earth: A History. W. W. Norton & Company.^[15][16]