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, the earth sciences, and photography.
My book, Until the Last Ton: Fossil Fuels in India from Empire to the Climate Crisis, is the first history of fossil fuels in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. It tells the story of India's rise as a world-leading fossil economy in the twentieth century and the processes of empire, capitalism, and agroecological change that shaped it. The book shifts a prevailing focus within the environmental history of energy on production and consumption, to a longer-term perspective on land, subsurface property rights, geological knowledge, and mining conflicts, revealing the centrality of agrarian development to India's trajectory of fossil fuel dependence.
I am currently at work on a second book project on climate change and the making of the Third World after 1945.
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
"Burning After Empire," Roundtable on "Decolonization" for The American Historical Review (under review)
"The Subterranean," edited with Robyn d'Avignon, Osiris, Volume 43 (accepted, in preparation)
"Subterranean Archives," edited with Robyn d'Avignon, Special Forum for Environmental History 31 (2), 2026
"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 (forthcoming)
“Capital, Earth, and Image: Photography in India's Extractive Landscapes,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Special Section, “Materializing Land," 45 (2), 2025: 361 - 381
“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
Society of Hellman Fellows, 2026 - 2027
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
