Sunil S. Amrith (born 4 September 1979)^[1][2] is a historian who is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University. His research interests include transnational migration in South and Southeast Asia.^[3]

Amrith was born in Kenya to parents from Tamil Nadu and he was raised in Singapore. He received his postsecondary education and later his doctorate at the University of Cambridge, and then taught at Birkbeck, University of London until 2015, when he became a professor of South Asian history at Harvard University.^[3][4] He also co-directed the Joint Center for History and Economics between Harvard and the University of Cambridge, and was interim director of Harvard's Mahindra Humanities Center.^[3] In 2020, Yale University announced that they had appointed Amrith as a professor of history.^[5]

Amrith was awarded the 2016 Infosys Prize in Humanities for contributions to the fields of the history of migration, environmental history, the history of international public health, and the history of contemporary Asia.^[6] He became a MacArthur Fellow in 2017.^[2] Amrith has also authored several non-fiction books. Unruly Waters, which studies the influence of water on the political and economic development of the Indian subcontinent,^[7] was shortlisted for the 2019 Cundill History Prize.^[8] In 2022 he won the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History.^[9]

Works

• Amrith, Sunil S. (2006). Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia, 1930-65. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781403985934.
• Amrith, Sunil S. (2011). Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521727020.^[10]
• Amrith, Sunil S. (2013). Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674287242.^[11][12]
• Harper, Tim N.; Amrith, Sunil S., eds. (2014). Sites of Asian Interaction: Ideas, Networks and Mobility. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139979474. ISBN 9781139979474.
• Amrith, Sunil S. (2018). Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts and Seas Have Shaped Asia's History. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 9780465097739.^[13]