Hello! I am an Assistant Professor of Environmental History at the University of California, Berkeley. I research and write about fossil fuels and climate change within histories of capitalism, empire, and post-colonial development. My book, Until the Last Ton: Fossil Fuels in India from Empire to the Climate Crisis, will be published with Princeton University Press in August 2026. Recent work has appeared in The Radical History Review, Past and Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, History Compass, H-Environment, Borderlines, Warscapes, SAMAJ, and in the edited volume Staking Claims: The Politics of Social Movements in Contemporary Rural India.

My article, “Subterranean Properties: India’s Political Ecology of Coal, 1870 - 1975,” was awarded the Jack Goody Prize by Comparative Studies in Society and History for 2022. An interview about the article and my wider work is available here.

I received my Ph.D. in History from New York University in 2019. Prior to joining the History Department at UC Berkeley, I was an Assistant Professor at Duke, and held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources. Before that, I worked on the implementation of India’s Forest Rights Act in western Odisha.

Photos of India’s Jharia coalfields here and on the Homepage tab were taken by the Kolkata-based photographer Ronny Sen from his series, “The End.” You can learn more about Ronny's work on Jharia and his new projects here. A recent conversation on the Jharia series with the anthropologist Christopher Pinney is currently hosted by the Indian visual arts initiative, Critical Collective.