My book, Until the Last Ton: Fossil Fuels in India from Empire to the Climate Crisis (Princeton University Press, 2026) is an environmental history of India’s rise as one of the world’s largest fossil fuel-producing nation-states in the twentieth century. It tells the story of colonial and post-colonial projects to control the subterranean wealth of the coal-bearing landscapes of highland eastern India, emphasizing how contestations over land, subsurface property, and the displacement of Adivasi (Indigenous) communities have shaped India’s fossil fuel dependency.

I am currently at work on two related projects: a series of essays on environmental thinking in Cold War social science and a history of climate change in the Indian Ocean. I am also interested in the visual history of extractive industry and have written about one group of mining photographs for The Radical History Review. Below are two additional photographs: (1) miners descending underground, from a collection at the International Labour Organisation; and (2) seismic surveying for oil in the Bengal Basin, from the ExxonMobil collection at the Briscoe Center for American History.