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Vice Provost for International Affairs
Sunil Amrith serves as Vice Provost for International Affairs and as Henry R. Luce Director of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. He is also the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History, with a secondary appointment as professor at the Yale School of the Environment.
In his role as Vice Provost, Sunil coordinates with senior leaders, faculty, and staff to advance Yale’s research on issues of global importance, educate students for international leadership and citizenship, and form partnerships that benefit communities around the world. He also advises university leaders on global matters and oversees international affairs offices and programs, including the Office of International Affairs, the Office of International Students and Scholars, the President’s Council on International Activities, and several other programs led by the senior associate provost for international affairs.
Sunil’s research focuses on the movements of people and the ecological processes that have connected South and Southeast Asia and has expanded to encompass global environmental history. He has published in the fields of environmental history, the history of migration, and the history of public health. Sunil is the recipient of the 2025 Toynbee Prize, the 2024 Fukuoka Academic Prize, the 2022 Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for History, a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship, and the 2016 Infosys Prize in Humanities. In 2024, he was elected an international fellow of the British Academy.
Before coming to Yale, Sunil was the inaugural Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies at Harvard University from 2015 to 2020, where he also served as codirector of the Joint Center for History and Economics and interim director of the Mahindra Humanities Center (in 2019-2020). From 2006 to 2015, he taught at Birkbeck College at the University of London. He grew up in Singapore and received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Cambridge.
Julie Byron