Sunil Amrith is Yale’s vice provost for international affairs and the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History, with a secondary appointment as professor at the Yale School of the Environment. He also serves as Henry R. Luce Director of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.
In his role as vice provost, Professor Amrith 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 has oversight of 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.
Professor Amrith’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. Professor Amrith 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.
Professor Amrith’s newest book, The Burning Earth, is an environmental history of the modern world that foregrounds the experiences of the Global South. The book was named to The New Yorker’s list of “Essential Reads of 2024,” and is being translated into ten languages.
Professor Amrith’s four previous books include Unruly Waters (Basic Books and Penguin UK)—shortlisted for the 2019 Cundill Prize, and reviewed in Nature, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Review of Books—and Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Harvard University Press, 2013), which was awarded the American Historical Association’s John F. Richards Prize in 2014, and selected as an Editor’s Choice title by the New York Times Book Review. Professor Amrith serves on the editorial board of Modern Asian Studies and the advisory board of Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics, and he is one of the series editors of the Princeton University Press book series, Histories of Economic Life.
Before coming to Yale, Professor Amrith 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.