Research Expertise and Interest

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

Research Description

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 dual emphasis on how environments have been transformed by modern regimes of science, economy, law, and infrastructure, and the ways in which such transformations have come to shape global politics.

His book in progress, Subterranean Lands: India, Fossil Fuels, and the Limits of the Earth (under contract with Princeton University Press), is an environmental history of the making of India’s fossil economy. The book examines contestations over land and nature in India’s coal and petroleum-producing regions since 1800, and the role of these political economies of extraction in constituting wider processes of empire, decolonization, and post-colonial development.

He is currently completing several new research and writing projects of varying length: a comparative history of extractive economies and anti-extractive social movements in the long 1970s, a history of concrete and “Third World” urbanism in the late Cold War, and a genealogy of “energy” within development economics.   

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.