Dr Sunil Amrith

Senior Lecturer

Postal Address:

Department of History, Classics and Archaeology
Birkbeck, University of London
London, WC1B 5DQ

Office: Room 3.14, 27 Russell Square
Email: s.amrith@bbk.ac.uk
Tel: 020 7631 6423

My research focuses on the movement of people, ideas, and institutions between South and Southeast Asia. My recent work has been on the Bay of Bengal as a region of cultural and political interaction, focusing on the history of migration, and on environmental history.
I have been awarded a “Starting Grant” by the European Research Council to support a new project on the environmental history of the Bay of Bengal littoral. “Coastal Frontiers: Water, Power and the Boundaries of South Asia” will run from 2012 to 2017: more information will be found on the project’s website, which will be available from 2012.
My most recent book, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2011) is a concise introduction to the history of Asian migration: http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item5761557/?site_locale=en_GB
I am currently working on a book on the Bay of Bengal’s history, which will bring together the history of migration with environmental history: Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants will be published by Harvard University Press in 2013/4.

With Dr Tim Harper (University of Cambridge) I coordinate a research programme on Sites of Asian Interaction, based at the Cambridge Centre for History and Economics. The project website is at: http://www-histecon.kings.cam.ac.uk/sai/index.html.
The project on Sites of Asian Interaction forms part of a wider project at the Centre for History and Economics on ‘Exchanges of Political, Economic, and Legal Ideas since 1780’: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~histecon/exel/
With Dr Patricia Clavin (University of Oxford), I am involved in a joint project on the global history of food, hunger and development.

I welcome enquiries from prospective research students interested in working on many aspects of modern Indian, Southeast Asian or global history.

I will be on research leave from Birkbeck between January 2012 and January 2017 to work on my European Research Council-funded project. However, I will continue to accept new doctoral students during this time.

Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
'Indians Overseas? Governing Tamil Migration to Malaya, 1870-1941', Past and Present, number 208 (August 2010), pp. 231-61
'Tamil Diasporas across the Bay of Bengal', American Historical Review, 114, 3 (June 2009), pp. 547-72
'Food and Welfare in India, c. 1900-1950', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 50, 4 (2008), pp. 1010-1035
Sunil Amrith, with Glenda Sluga, 'New Histories of the UN', Journal of World History, 19.3 (2008)
Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia, 1930-65 (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2006)