My current book manuscript is a history of the environmental, infrastructural, and political transformations that made India into one of the world’s largest fossil fuel-producing nation-states. It tells the story of colonial and post-colonial projects to control the subterranean wealth of the subcontinent, and how fossil fuel dependency has more widely shaped contemporary India’s democracy and economy. The book draws on a rich range of archival sources from three countries and in multiple Indian languages, and offers one of the first appraisals of India’s energy history from the colonial period to the global energy crisis of the 1970s.

In addition to the book, I am engaged in several new writing and research areas, including new work on the environmental history of concrete and “Third World” urbanism, a global history of anti-extractive and Indigenous movements in the late Cold War, and a study of mining photography and visual representations of the climate crisis.