“A new history for the Anthropocene: Mapping the environmental history and natural heritage of India; Forests, Sacred Groves, Mining and communities.”
Professor Damodaran is an historian of modern India, interested in sustainable development dialogues in the global South. Her work ranges from the social and political history of Bihar to the environmental history of South Asia, including using historical records to understand climate change in the Indian Ocean World. Her publications include Broken Promises, Indian Nationalism and the Congress Party in Bihar (1992); Nature and the Orient, Essays on the Environmental History of South and South-East Asia (1998); Post Colonial India, History Politics and Culture (2000); British Empire and the natural world: environmental encounters in South Asia (2010); East India Company and the Natural world (2014); Climate change and the Humanities (2017); Geography in Britain after the second World War (2019); Commonwealth Forestry and Environmental History, Empire, Forests; and Colonial environments in Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and New Zealand (2020).
She is also the author of several articles in established journals. She is particularly interested in questions of environmental change, identity and resistance in Eastern India. An experienced researcher and teacher, she has an M.Phil from JNU and a PhD from Cambridge. She is the director of the Centre for World Environmental History at Sussex. The centre is host to several research projects and a number of research associates. Dr Damodaran has had several research grants for her work from the ESRC, the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy and the AHRC. She is currently leading an AHRC network project on the botanical and meteorological history of the Indian Ocean and is working on two projects, one with the McGill university and the second with Noragric. The centre collaborates actively with Kew Gardens, the British Library, the U.K. Met office and several international institutions both in India and elsewhere such as JNU, the Botanical Survey of India, Kolkata, the Indian Museum, Kolkata, the Forest Research Institute, Dehradun, and Mcgill University, Canada and IDS, Sussex. She is engaged in building up the profile of South Asian studies and environmental history at the University of Sussex and internationally. She currently supervises 6 Phd students and is mentoring several post-doctoral scholars. She is also co-editor of the Palgrave series in World Environmental History.