Migration and the Environment: A View from Coastal Asia
04 Feb 2022
03.30 PM - 05.00 PM
Alumni, Current Students, Industry/Academic Partners, Prospective Students, Public
Migration and environmental change are two of the most pressing issues confronting the world—both processes are often followed by the word “crisis,” and increasingly they are connected in public discourse, through terms like “environmental refugee.” Yet the fields of migration history and environmental history have proceeded along parallel lines, with few points of intersection until recently. This lecture begins by asking why that has been the case; and then aims to imagine what it would involve to connect environmental history and the history of migration in new ways, focusing on a range of experiences across South and Southeast Asia–-a part of the world where both historical processes have always been deeply connected.
Speaker: Professor Sunil Amrith
Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of four books, including Crossing the Bay of Bengal (2013), winner of the AHA’s John F. Richards prize, and Unruly Waters (2018), shortlisted for the Cundill Prize. Amrith is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow, and in 2016 received the Infosys Prize in Humanities. Before arriving at Yale in 2020, Amrith taught at Harvard University and the University of London. He grew up in Singapore, and received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Cambridge. Amrith is currently writing a global environmental history anchored in the view from South and Southeast Asia.