Participants

Clark Alejandrino teaches at Trinity College. After finishing his undergraduate degree in history in the Philippines, Clark Alejandrino trained in Sinology in Australia and went on to finish a Ph.D. in East Asian Environmental History at Georgetown University. He specializes in the environmental history of China, especially its climate and animal history, covering the fifth to the twentieth century in his research. He is currently preparing a book manuscript on typhoons in the history of the South China coast and preparing to embark on a new project exploring the history of migratory birds in East Asia. At Trinity, he teaches courses on Chinese history, environmental history, world history, and Pacific history. He has received funding for his research from the Social Science Research Council, American Council of Learned Societies, Henry Luce Foundation, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and the National Central Library of Taiwan.

Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History, and current chair of the South Asian Studies Council. His research focuses on the movements of people and the ecological processes that have connected South and Southeast Asia. Amrith’s areas of particular interest include environmental history, the history of migration, and the history of public health. Amrith is the recipient of the 2022 A.H. Heineken Prize for History, a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship, and the 2016 Infosys Prize in Humanities.

Amrith’s most recent book is Unruly Waters (Basic Books and Penguin UK), a history of the struggle to understand and control the monsoon in modern South Asia. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Cundill Prize, and was reviewed in Nature, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Review of Books. His previous book, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Harvard University Press, 2013) was awarded the American Historical Association’s John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History in 2014, and was selected as an Editor’s Choice title by the New York Times Book Review. He is also the author of Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Decolonizing International Health: South and Southeast Asia, 1930-1965 (Palgrave, 2006), as well as articles in journals including the American Historical Review, Past and Present, The Lancet and Economic and Political Weekly. Amrith serves on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and Modern Asian Studies, and he is one of the series editors of the Princeton University Press book series, Histories of Economic Life.

Amrith is currently writing The Ruins of Freedom, an environmental history of the modern world to be published W.W. Norton and Allen Lane, as well as in Chinese, Korean, Italian, Dutch, German, and French translations. Current collaborative projects include research with Professor David S. Jones (Harvard University) on the history of air pollution and health in India.

Before coming to Yale, Amrith was the inaugural Mehra Family Professor of South Asian History 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. Sunil Amrith grew up in Singapore, and received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Cambridge.

Chandana Anusha is a scholar of social and environmental dynamics with a particular interest in coastal regions in India. She completed her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Yale University in June 2021. Her first book project, The Living Coast: Port Development and Ecological Transformations in the Gulf of Kutch, Western India, focuses on how ecological and infrastructural processes intersect in an era of climate change and global trade. As a co-principal investigator of Mangroves and Tangled Futures, an SSRC-funded transregional collaboration on the Indian Ocean, she extends her attention to coastal development by tracing the connections between Gujarat and East Africa amid histories of trade and migration, expanding geopolitical agreements in agribusiness and energy extraction, and the rising influence of environmental change. She has taught courses on environmental justice, coastal built environments, and South Asia. From 2021-2022, she was a postdoctoral fellow with the Princeton Mellon Initiative of Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University. At Northwestern, Anusha will teach a course and assist in activities across the Council for Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), the Environmental Humanities Research Workshop, and the Program in Environmental Policy and Culture.

Chris Reed Coggins is a professor of Geography and Asian Studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock (Open Society University Network).  He is the co-editor (with Bixia Chen) of Sacred Forests of Asia: Politics, Ecology, Cosmology (Routledge/Earthscan, forthcoming), and the co-editor (with Emily Yeh) of Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes of the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands (University of Washington, 2014). He is the author of The Tiger and the Pangolin: Nature, Culture, and Conservation in China (University of Hawaii Press, 2003) (runner-up for the 2003 Julian Steward Award for best book in environmental/ecological anthropology and nominated for the Kiriyama Prize in non-fiction.  He has published numerous refereed articles and chapters in geography, environment, and Asia-related books and periodicals. In 2019, he was selected to serve as one of fourteen scholars in Asian Studies on the ASIANetwork Speakers Bureau.

Christopher Courtney is an Associate Professor in Modern Chinese History at the University of Durham. He a social and environmental historian, specializing in the history of Wuhan and its rural hinterland. His previous research focussed upon the history of nature-induced disasters in the 19th and 20th centuries. His monograph The Nature of Disaster in China examined the history of the 1931 Central China Flood. Chris has also published on topics including the history of environmental religion, fire disasters, and Maoist flood (mis)management.  His current research focusses on the problem of heat in modern Chinese cities. This forms part of collaborative research project based at the National University of Singapore entitled Heat in Urban Asia: Past, Present and Future.

Christopher Courtney is an Associate Professor in Modern Chinese History at the University of Durham. He a social and environmental historian, specializing in the history of Wuhan and its rural hinterland. His previous research focussed upon the history of nature-induced disasters in the 19th and 20th centuries. His monograph The Nature of Disaster in China examined the history of the 1931 Central China Flood. Chris has also published on topics including the history of environmental religion, fire disasters, and Maoist flood (mis)management.  His current research focusses on the problem of heat in modern Chinese cities. This forms part of collaborative research project based at the National University of Singapore entitled Heat in Urban Asia: Past, Present and Future.

Rohan D’Souza is a professor at the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies (Kyoto University). His PhD was awarded from the Centre for Historical Studies (Jawaharlal Nehru University).  He was elected General Secretary of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Student’s Union (1989-90),  on the political platform of the All India Student’s Federation.He has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Agrarian Studies Program (Yale University) and at the University of California (Berkeley), besides having had visiting fellowships at the Centre for the Advanced Study of India (University of Pennsylvania) and at the Resources Management Asia-Pacific (Australian National University).  He holds honorary affiliation as  Senior Research Associate at the Centre for World Environmental History (University of Sussex) and was the Short Term Chair at the University of Tokyo ( Japan) as Visiting Professor of Contemporary Indian Studies.He is the author of Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood control in Eastern India (2006) and the joint editor of   The British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South Asia (2011). He has also edited the  Environment, Technology, and Development: Critical and Subversive essays (2012) for the Economic and Political Weekly Series. His research interests and publications cover themes in environmental history, political ecology, sustainable development, and modern technology.

Prasenjit Duara is the Oscar Tang Chair of East Asian Studies at Duke University. He was born and educated in India and received his PhD in Chinese history from Harvard University. He was previously Professor and Chair of the Dept of History and Chair of the Committee on Chinese Studies at the University of Chicago (1991-2008). Subsequently, he became Raffles Professor of Humanities and Director, Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore (2008-2015).In 1988, he published Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (Stanford Univ Press) which won the Fairbank Prize of the AHA and the Levenson Prize of the AAS, USA. Among his other books are Rescuing History from the Nation (U Chicago 1995), Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Rowman 2003) and most recently, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future  (Cambridge 2014). He has edited Decolonization: Now and Then (Routledge, 2004) and co-edited A Companion to Global Historical Thought with Viren Murthy and  Andrew Sartori (John Wiley, 2014). His work has been widely translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and the European languages.

Yan Gao, Ph.D., is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at the University of Memphis. She specializes in social and environmental history of the central Yangzi valley, water history, and Asian environmental humanities. Her first book, Yangzi Waters: Transforming the Water Regime of the Jianghan Plain in Late Imperial China, was published by Brill in early 2022

Arunabh Ghosh (BA Haverford; PhD Columbia) is a historian of twentieth century China with interests in social and economic history, history of science, environmental history, and China-India history. He is currently an Associate Professor in the History Department at Harvard University. Ghosh’s first book, Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China (Princeton University Press, 2020), explores how the Chinese communist state built capacity to know the nation through numbers. He is currently working on a history of small hydroelectric power in twentieth century China and a history of China-India scientific connections. Ghosh’s work has appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Osiris, International Journal of Asian Studies, EASTS, and other venues.

David Gilmartin studied modern South Asian history.  He received his BA from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. in History from the University of California–Berkeley.  He has conducted research in India and Pakistan.

His research interest focus on the intersections between the history of British imperialism in South Asia and the development of modern politics and forms of rule.   His most recent book, Blood and Water:  The Indus River Basin in Modern History (2015) examines the intersection between environmental and political history over the last 200 years.  Current research focuses on the legal history of India’s electoral institutions as they have evolved from its colonial past, and on the ways these institutions have reflected evolving visions of sovereignty.

Gilmartin’s current projects include the historical study of the legal, institutional and intellectual structures that underlie Indian democracy, and continuing work on issues relating to India’s partition of 1947 and the creation of Pakistan.

Nadin Heé is Associate Professor (Juniorprofessor) for Global History of Knowledge at the Freie Universität Berlin and at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science after a visiting professorship at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and teaching at Zurich University.

Nadin has a background in Empire Studies and a focus on East Asia, and her critical engagement with postcolonial theory and theories of violence and trans-imperial aspects of colonial history has been published as Imperiales Wissen und koloniale Gewalt. Japans Herrschaft in Taiwan 1895-1945, (Campus Verlag, 2012), which was awarded the JaDe-Prize.Currently she is interested in global exploration and exploitation of marine resources, particularly from a history of knowledge and environmental historical perspective. She is working on a second monograph that deals with the question how tuna became a global commons.During Nadin’s fellowship at LMU’s Global History Center she continues working on this book project in which she follows tuna on three levels, first, as a migratory species, second, tracing how human labor, knowledge production, and resource extraction, and not least imperialism and international politics have been shaped by its migration and environmental factors. Second, she follows tuna and its commodification, such as in form of tinned tuna or sashimi, and thirdly on the level of discourse, mainly, how the fish has been appropriated on an imperial and national level.

Martha Kaplan is Professor of Anthropology at Vassar College. A cultural and political anthropologist of colonial and postcolonial societies, her recent work focuses on the anthropology of water, nation and environmental imagination.  She is the author of Neither Cargo Nor Cult: Ritual Politics and the Colonial Imagination in Fiji (Duke 1995) and  Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization (co-author John Kelly, Chicago 2001). An edited collection, Outside Gods and Foreign Powers: Making Local History with Global Means in the Pacific (Ethnohistory 2005) includes her first study of the local consequences of the production of Fiji Water.  “Fijian Water in Fiji and New York” 2007 and “Lonely Drinking Fountains and Comforting Coolers” 2011 appeared in Cultural Anthropology, and “Nation and Conservation: Postcolonial Water Narratives in Singapore Rituals” 2016 appeared in JMBRAS. Her book project, Water Cultures: Fiji, New York, Singapore considers water and its uses simultaneously as public and privatized, as necessity and object of fantasy, as locus of exploitation and as source of postcolonial innovation, as a public utility and an environmental resource. In 2014-15 she held a Fulbright Fellowship and was Distinguished Affiliated Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Her research has been supported by  American Institute of Indian Studies, Fulbright, National Science Foundation, and the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

Mathias “Matt” Kondolf is Professor of Environmental Planning and Geography at the University of California Berkeley, where he teaches river restoration, environmental planning, environmental science, and hydrology. Trained as a geologist, hydrologist, and fluvial geomorphologist, his research focuses on human-river interactions, including managing flood-prone lands, urban rivers, river restoration, sustainable management of reservoirs and regulated rivers. His 3 books and over 200 papers have received more than 19,000 citations.  Matt advises governments and non-governmental organizations, serving two terms on the Environmental Advisory Board to the Chief of the US Army Corps of Engineers, and providing expert testimony before the US Congress, California legislature, California Water Resources Control Board, US Supreme Court, International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration (the Hague). Matt was a fellow at the Collegium of Lyon (Institute for Advanced Study) 2017-2018. With three collaborators, he received the 2021 Aspen Italia Institute Award for collaborative research US-Italy for their joint research on potential benefits of strategic dam planning for the Mekong.

Ruth Mostern is a specialist in spatial and environmental history focusing on imperial China and the world. An interdisciplinary scholar with research interests bridging the humanities, social sciences, information science and environmental science, she has authored one book and edited another and has completed two major digital publications and eighteen articles. She has raised approximately $1.8 million in extramural funding and currently holds grants from both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation.

Mostern’s current research reconstructs the environmental history of the Yellow River as a human and natural system. She is studying the entire river basin (which stretches from the Tibetan plateau to the Pacific Ocean) during a timeframe of approximately 5,000 years in order to assess when, and to what degree, human activity in the upper and middle reaches of the river increased the risk of flooding on the densely populated lower course of the river. She is creating a digital atlas that includes a GIS (a digital mapping system) and database of the dates and locations of disasters and civil engineering works in the river basin. This data-rich atlas will support interdisciplinary advances in the understanding of large-scale human-environmental impact.

Mostern is also Principal Investigator of a collaborative initiative, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, to create a World-Historical Gazetteer that includes content and infrastructure for spatial linked open data to permit large-scale and long-term historical analysis and visualization.

Jonas Rüegg is an environmental historian of Asia and the Pacific at the University of Zurich (Switzerland). His prospective book “The Kuroshio Frontier: Business, State, and Environment in the Making of Japan’s Pacific” explores the role of the Kuroshio Current and its meanders in the making of institutions and ideologies that shaped the modern international order of the Asia-Pacific. His longue-durée research, which reaches back to the seventeenth century, connects geopolitics and environmental change, and it relates to present-day tensions over artificial islands, fishing rights, and naval access.

Having completed his B.A. at the University of Zürich, Jonas served the Embassy of Switzerland in Japan, before he started his graduate studies at Harvard University. In the context of his archival research, Jonas has taught and conducted research at Tokyo University, Academia Sinica, and other institutions in East Asia.

Raorao Su is a doctoral candidate in history from Renmin University of China. Since October 2022, he has been a visiting student at the University of Pittsburgh. His dissertation project is research on the environmental history of water in Xinjiang in Qing dynasty. He emphasizes the use of interdisciplinary approaches based on multi-source data, materials, and methods in his research. Rao specializes in Historical Geographical Information System (HGIS), especially in spatial analysis and cartography, and he is also interested in digital humanities, and paleoenvironmental reconstruction of semi-arid and arid areas.

James Wescoat, Jr. is Aga Khan Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture and Geography at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Jim coordinated the SMArchS Urbanism program and co-directed MIT’s Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.  Jim’s research concentrates on water systems in South Asia and the US from the site to river basin scales. For much of his career, Professor Wescoat has focused on small-scale historical waterworks of Mughal gardens and cities in India and Pakistan. He continues to write about historic water systems in Agra, Delhi, Lahore, and Kashmir. At the larger scale, Jim has conducted water policy research in the Colorado, Indus, Ganges, and Great Lakes basins.  He has chaired National Research Council studies of Glen Canyon Dam, lower Great Lakes, and Mississippi River delta.  Jim’s recent research has focused on intermediate-scale regional water systems. This includes research on rural drinking water supply in Maharashtra, India, funded by the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design; the sociohydrology of water systems in Punjab, Pakistan; and the historical geography of water management in South Asia.

Jerome Whitington is an anthropologist of science and environment who received his PhD from UC Berkeley. He specializes in climate change, water and flooding, and practices of quantification and engineering. His research is focused on mainland Southeast Asia, especially Thailand and Laos. His recently published book is Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower (Cornell, 2018), and he has published in journals such as parallax and Cultural Anthropology, including the forthcoming research article “Earth’s Data: Climate Change, Thai Carbon Markets, and the Planetary Atmosphere” (American Anthropologist). He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Experimental Earth: A Speculative Anthropology of Climate Change. He was formerly Convenor of the Asia Pacific Science Technology and Society Network.   Prior to joining Gallatin Jerome was Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at NYU, and Senior Research Fellow and Teaching Fellow at the National University of Singapore. He also held a postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth College. His research has been funded by Fulbright-Hays and the Ford Foundation.