Matthew Shutzer is an environmental historian of South Asia whose research and teaching focus on the role of the environment in global history since the eighteenth century. His work examines how modern regimes of science, economy, law, and infrastructure have transformed environments and, in turn, how these transformations have shaped global politics.
His book in progress, Subterranean Lands: India, Fossil Fuels, and the Limits of the Earth (under contract with Princeton University Press), explores the environmental history of India’s fossil economy. It traces contestations over land and natural resources in India's coal and petroleum-producing regions since 1800, highlighting the role of extractive political economies in shaping empire, decolonization, and post-colonial development.
Currently, he is working on several new research and writing projects, including a comparative history of extractive economies and anti-extractive social movements in the long 1970s, a study of concrete and “Third World” urbanism during the late Cold War, and an inquiry into the genealogy of “energy” within development economics.
Before joining the History Department at UC Berkeley, Shutzer served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Duke University. He was also 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.
