Dr Sunil Amrith Awarded ERC Starting Grant Case Study
A European Research Council Starting Grant has been awarded to Dr Sunil Amrith to support a major research project examining the environmental and political history of the Bay of Bengal’s coastal regions over the past century.
The research is one of two projects in Birkbeck’s Department of History, Classics and Archaeology to be awarded ERC Starting Grants in the same year, bringing £1.5m in research funding to the Department.
Water—the rains, rivers, and seas—is crucial to Asia’s future and to understanding its past. The coastal regions at the heart of what was once known as ‘monsoon Asia’ have more recently been called the ‘ground zero of climate change’. They are environmentally vulnerable, densely populated, and at the fault-line of struggles between India and China for regional dominance. Dr Sunil Amrith’s research project, Coastal Frontiers: Water, Power and the Boundaries of South Asia, will position the current crisis in a deeper history of environmental transformation and political change.
Sunil, senior lecturer in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, will lead the five year project, working with newly-appointed post-doctoral fellow Dr Debojyoti Das. They will undertake extensive archival and oral historical research in India and Southeast Asia, focusing on how environmental change has been experienced in the region; on how water resources have been contested; and on how coastal environments have been transformed by colonial and post-colonial political borders.
“For the European Research Council to be funding major projects such as this in the current climate is really heartening,” says Sunil. “This is exciting because environmental history is such a vibrant interdisciplinary field. It considers issues that cross borders and politics.
“One of the major questions underlying this project is how people have experienced environmental change in the past. These coastal communities have long experience in dealing with disasters but have also seen a gradual process of change – at the same time we know the region is likely to be badly affected by climate change in the next 30-50 years. I will be looking to show what a historian can bring to our understanding of environmental change. ”
The investigators will hold a major international conference on the theme of water and environmental change at Birkbeck in 2015-16. In addition to academic publications, a website will outline research in progress, and make available some of the archival material.
“We’re also looking at doing a research blog,” Sunil adds. “We have a role to play in preserving and observing archival material that is difficult to access, or threatened with decay. We hope also to make a short documentary film of all the oral history we gather. The idea is to bring the project’s findings to a wide public.”