"Tamils and Others in the Bay of Bengal, 1800-1950"

Dr. Sunil Amrith's research focuses on the connections between modern Indian and Southeast Asian history. His current research is on the history of south Indian migration to Southeast Asia (particularly Burma, Malaysia and Singapore), from the 18th to the 20th centuries. He is interested in Tamil-speaking migrants' circulation across the Bay of Bengal, and particularly in how Tamils' engagement with others—Chinese, Malay, Burmese, and other South Asians—shaped their political ideas and cultural practices. His work also looks at how the changing notions of citizenship and nationality that accompanied decolonization produced very different experiences for Tamils in different parts of the region. He has been awarded a Large Research Grant by the British Academy to support the project, which is entitled ‘Cosmopolitanism and Race in Tamil Southeast Asia'. On a related but broader subject, he is currently writing a general history of Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia for Cambridge University Press.

Dr. Amrith's earlier work was on the history of public health in South and Southeast Asia. His book Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia, 1930-65 (Palgrave, 2006) examined the role played by ideas about health, in broader debates about the post-colonial order, and looked especially at the role of international organizations as a forum for such debates. He maintains an active research interest in the history of public health, and especially in the history of hunger and nutrition in the rice-eating regions of South and Southeast Asia. In the future, he plans to work on the history of humanitarian thought and practice in the region.

Dr. Amrith is involved in a number of collaborative projects: with Dr Tim Harper (University of Cambridge), he is directing a workshop on ‘Sites of Inter-Asian Interaction', as part of an SSRC workshop on Inter-Asian Connections, to be held in Dubai in February 2008: http://www.ssrc.org/program_areas/global/papers/
With Dr Patricia Clavin (University of Oxford) he is developing a long-term research project on the global history of hunger, feeding and development.
With Professor Glenda Sluga (University of Sydney) he has jointly edited a special volume of the Journal of World History on new histories of the United Nations (scheduled to appear in September 2008).
Dr. Amrith has had a long involvement with the work of the Harvard/Cambridge Centre for History and Economics, and in particular its projects on United Nations and International History, and on Exchanges of Economic and Political Ideas Since 1760: http://www-histecon.kings.cam.ac.uk/

Dr. Amrith is also one of the editors of History Workshop Journal.