Contact Sunil
Representation: Don Fehr, Trident Media Group: [email protected]
About Sunil Amrith
Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University, with a secondary appointment as Professor at the Yale School of the Environment. He serves as Director of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, and as Yale’s Vice Provost for International Affairs.
Amrith is a prize-winning historian, a dedicated teacher, and author of five books that put Asia at the heart of global history and show how the movement of people has changed the planet. He combines a storyteller’s eye with two decades of archival research across languages and continents. Together with Ruth Coffey, he has also made his first foray into literature for children.
Amrith is a Fellow of the British Academy, and received the 2016 Infosys Prize in Humanities, a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2022 Heineken Prize in History, the 2024 Fukuoka Academic Prize, and the 2025 Toynbee Prize in Global History.
Amrith was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and grew up in Singapore, where his parents moved when he was a baby. Growing up at a crossroads of trade and migration left him with a deep interest in how cultures meet and mix. As a child he had the good fortune to be able to travel widely in India and Southeast Asia, and they remain the parts of the world that most fascinate him as a historian.
He received his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from the University of Cambridge and then spent ten years teaching at Birkbeck College, University of London—where his students were adult learners who came to class in the evening after a full day of work. He learned, there, to make historical research as accessible as possible to a curious but busy audience. He arrived in the United States in 2015, when he joined the Harvard faculty as a tenured professor, and then moved to Yale in 2020.
Sunil Amrith currently lives in Hamden, Connecticut with his wife, Ruth Coffey, and their two children. When Sunil is not teaching or writing, his great love is jazz. A thoroughly urban creature, he is slowly coming to appreciate the pleasures of Connecticut’s woods and its rich coastal ecology.
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