Research Bio

Matthew Shutzer is an environmental historian of South Asia. His research and teaching are concerned with the place of the environment in global history since the eighteenth century, with a particular focus on fossil fuels, agriculture, and climate change.

His book, Until the Last Ton: Fossil Fuels in India from Empire to the Climate Crisis will be published by Princeton University Press in August 2026. The book examines the making of India's fossil economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, connecting India's rise as a world-leading fossil energy producer to wider processes of empire, capitalism, and post-colonial development.

He is currently completing two new projects: a series of interconnected essays on ecological thinking in Cold War social science and a history of climate change in the Indian Ocean after 1945.    

Before coming to the History Department at UC Berkeley, he taught as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Duke University. He was previously a Junior Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies at Harvard University, and an S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellow in Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. 

Research Expertise and Interest

environmental history, modern South Asia, energy history, Science and Technology studies, histories of development and decolonization, empire, political economy, social theory