Colonialism and the Climate Crisis: Rethinking Legacies

A lecture by Prof Sunil Amrith (Yale University) organised by the Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities.

Please register for this event here.

This lecture examines the tangled paths that connect the history of colonialism to the climate crisis. A lot of recent work on ‘climate and colonialism’ focuses on the straight line that links colonial-era resource extraction, in service of an expanding European industrial capitalism, to the long-term commodification of nature and fossil fuel dependency that lie at the root of our current environmental catastrophes.

Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University, and Professor at the Yale School of the Environment. He is also the Henry R. Luce Director of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. Amrith is the author of five books, most recently The Burning Earth (W.W. Norton and Allen Lane, 2024), selected as a ‘book of the year’ by The New Yorker and The New Statesman in 2024. It is being translated into ten languages, with the German translation to appear with C. H. Beck in March 2025. Amrith is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow, and recipient of the 2022 Heineken Prize in History, a 2022 Falling Walls ‘Scientific Breakthrough of the Year’ award, and the 2024 Fukuoka Academic Prize for distinguished contributions to the study of Asian cultures. In 2024 he was elected an International Fellow of the British Academy.

Please let us know if you have any access requirements, such as ISL/English interpreting, so that we can facilitate you in attending this event. Contact: darcyjo@tcd.ie