Author of ‘The Burning Earth’ and Yale Professor Sunil Amrith Awarded Fukuoka Academic Prize
- The Indian American received the honor for practicing “global history from multiple perspectives such as environment and immigration.”
Yale history professor Sunil Amrith has been awarded the Fukuoka Academic Prize by the Secretariat of the Fukuoka Prize Committee. The Indian American received the honor for practicing “global history from multiple perspectives such as environment and immigration,” according to the award website.
The annual prize honors those who have made outstanding achievements in the fields of Asian studies and arts and culture. Named after the Japanese city, it was established in 1990 through the collaboration of the city government, academia and private businesses. Every year, three prizes- Grand, Education and Arts and culture prize are bestowed upon three laureates.
The Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University, Amrith has a secondary appointment as professor at the Yale School of the Environment. He is also the current chair of the Council on South Asian Studies at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.
His 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.
Born to an Indian immigrant family in Kenya in 1979, he spent his childhood in Singapore, and went on to the University of Cambridge to get a Ph.D. in history in 2005. His doctoral thesis culminated in a book titled “Decolonizing International Health” which discusses the history of international health care in South and Southeast Asia in the mid-20th century.
Before joining Yale, he was the inaugural Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies at Harvard University from 2015-20, where he also served as co-director of the Joint Center for History and Economics, and interim director of the Mahindra Humanities Center (in 2019-20). From 2006-2015, he taught at Birkbeck College at the University of London.
His new book, “The Burning Earth,” to be released this year, is an environmental history of the modern world that foregrounds the experiences of the Global South. His four previous books include “Unruly Waters” —shortlisted for the 2019 Cundill Prize, and “Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants”, 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.
He 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.
He is the recipient of the 2022 Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for History, a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship, and the 2016 Infosys Prize in Humanities. His work on environmental justice received a “scientific breakthrough of the year” award from the Falling Walls Foundation in 2022.