Dr. Matthew Shutzer

Biography

Matthew Shutzer is an environmental historian specializing in South Asia, with a focus on the historical relationships among environment, global history, and political economy from the eighteenth century onward. His research examines how modern regimes of science, economy, law, and infrastructure transformed environments and, in turn, how these transformations shaped global politics. His forthcoming book, Subterranean Lands: India, Fossil Fuels, Limits Earth, published by Princeton University Press, explores the environmental history of India's fossil fuel economy by tracing contestations over land and natural resources in India's coal and petroleum-producing regions since 1800. This work highlights the role of extractive political economies in shaping empire, decolonization, and post-colonial development. Currently, he is engaged in new research projects that compare extractive economies and anti-extractive social movements from the long 1970s and investigate the concept of 'energy' in the context of development economics during the late Cold War. Prior to joining the History Department at the University of California, Berkeley, Shutzer served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Duke University and was a Junior Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International Area Studies as well as a Fellow in Natural Resource Economics at the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley.

Research Interests