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 since the eighteenth century, with a dual emphasis on how environments have been transformed by modern regimes of science, economy, law, and infrastructure, and the ways in which such transformations have come to shape global politics.
My book in progress, Subterranean Lands: India, Fossil Fuels, and the Limits of the Earth (under contract with Princeton University Press), is an environmental history of the making of India’s fossil economy. The book examines contestations over land and nature in India’s coal and petroleum-producing regions since 1800, and the role of these political economies of extraction in constituting wider processes of empire, decolonization, and post-colonial development.
I am currently completing several new research and writing projects of varying length: a comparative history of extractive economies and anti-extractive social movements in the long 1970s, a history of concrete and “Third World” urbanism in the late Cold War, and a genealogy of “energy” within development economics.
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, and an S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellow in Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley.
Research Interests
Environmental history; modern South Asia; energy history; science and technology studies (STS); histories of development and decolonization; empire; political economy; comparative history and historical sociology; social theory
Education
PhD, New York University
Representative Publications
"The Subterranean," edited with Robyn d'Avignon, Osiris, Volume 43 (accepted, in preparation)
"The Struggle for Life: Politics and Ecology after Development," 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
“Energy in South Asia,” History Compass 18 (12), 2020
Recent Awards and Fellowships
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
