Assistant Professor
Environmental, Science, South Asia
I am an environmental historian of South Asia. My research and teaching are concerned with the place of the environment in global history, with a particular focus on fossil fuels, agriculture, forests, climate change, and environmental politics. I have also worked on topics that connect global environmental history to histories of law, capitalism, post-colonial development, and photography.
My book, Until the Last Ton: Fossil Fuels in India from Empire to the Climate Crisis, will be published with Princeton University Press in August 2026. The book examines India's rise as a world-leading fossil economy in the twentieth century and its relationship to deeper historical processes of empire and capitalism. It foregrounds the history of land and subsurface property rights in the coal-bearing territories of eastern India, the center of the country's fossil economy and a site of long-standing Adivasi (Indigenous) resistance to mining displacement.
Before coming to the History Department at UC Berkeley, I taught as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Duke University. I was previously a Junior Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies at Harvard University, an S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellow in Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley, and a researcher on several projects related to the implementation of India's Forest Rights Act in western Odisha.
With Rebecca Herman, Rebecca McLennan, and Bernadette Perez, I am one of the faculty conveners of the Berkeley Workshop on Environmental History located in the History Department.
Research Interests
Environmental history; modern South Asia; energy history; science and technology studies (STS); histories of development and decolonization; empire; political economy; social theory
Education
PhD, New York University
Representative Publications
"Subterranean Archives," edited with Robyn d'Avignon, Special Forum for Environmental History w/ Cameron Hu, Caylee Hong, Mary X. Mitchell, Gregg Mittman, Emmanuelle Roth, and Laith Shakir (under review)
"The Subterranean," edited with Robyn d'Avignon, Osiris, Volume 43 (accepted, in preparation)
"Ecology and Totality: Lineages of the Planetary in the Long 1970s," in Sharad Chari and Carolien Stolte (eds.) The Cambridge History of Colonialism and Decolonization, Volume V: The Colonial Present and the Planetary Demand (in preparation)
“Capital, Earth, and Image: Photography in India's Extractive Landscapes,” (forthcoming in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Special Issue, “Materializing Land”)
“Three Logics of Indian Socialism,” in Su Lin Lewis and Nana Osei-Opare (ed.), Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World (London: Bloomsbury, 2024)
“Fossil Fuels: From Extraction to Emissions,” co-authored with Elizabeth Chatterjee, Antoine Acker, Nathalia, Nathalia Capellini, and Lukas Becker in Emily O'Gorman et. al. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History (London: Routledge, 2024)
“A Vast Bed of Combustible Fuel: Sovereign Power and the Underground Commons in the Indian Anthropocene,” (with Arpitha Kodiveri), The Radical History Review Issue 145, 2023
“Oil, Money, and Decolonization in South Asia,” Past and Present 258 (1), 2023
“Subterranean Properties: India’s Political Ecology of Coal, 1870 – 1975,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 63 (2), 2021 (**Jack Goody Award, 2022)
“Energy in South Asia,” History Compass 18 (12), 2020
“Everyday Forest Rights: Property, Community and the State in Kalahandi District,” in Uday Chandra and Daniel Taghioff (eds.), Staking Claims: The Politics of Social Movements in Contemporary Rural India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016)
“The Practice of Custom in India’s Forest Rights Act: Case Studies from Kalahandi, Odisha,” SAMAJ: South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 7 (2013)
Recent Awards and Fellowships
UC Regents' Junior Faculty Fellowship, 2025
Research Fellow, Council of American Overseas Research Centers and the National Endowment for the Humanities, 2024 (Dhaka, Bangladesh)
Trent Research Fellowship in Medical History, 2023 - 2024 (awarded)
Landhaus Fellowship, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, 2022 (awarded)
Junior Fellow, Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Harvard University, 2019 - 2023
S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellow in Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy, UC Berkeley, 2020 - 2022
Social Science Research Council InterAsia Academy Fellowship, 2021
ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2018 – 2019
American Historical Association Bernadotte Schmitt Research Grant, 2018
Fulbright-Hays, 2016 - 2017
Social Science Research Council IDRF, 2015 - 2016
American Institute for Indian Studies Junior Fellowship, 2015
Fulbright-Nehru, 2011 - 2012
