2025 Toynbee Prize Announcement
The Toynbee Prize Foundation’s Board of Trustees is pleased to announce that the 2025 recipient of the Toynbee Prize is Sunil Amrith. Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University, with a secondary appointment as Professor at the Yale School of the Environment. He has been awarded the Toynbee Prize for his exceptional work on the movement of peoples as shaped by environmental forces, work that has brought the regions of South/Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean to the center of global historical scholarship. He has published in the fields of environmental history, the history of migration, and the history of public health.
Amrith’s most recent book is The Burning Earth: A History, an environmental history of the modern world that foregrounds the experiences of the Global South (W.W. Norton and Penguin, UK). It was selected as an “essential read” of 2024 by The New Yorker, and as a book of the year by The New Statesman, The Hindu, and NPR. It is being translated into 10 languages.
Amrith’s four previous books include Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia’s History (Basic Books and Penguin UK)—shortlisted for the 2019 Cundill Prize—and Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Harvard University Press, 2013), which was awarded the American Historical Association’s John F. Richards Prize in 2014, and selected as an Editor’s Choice title by the New York Times Book Review. Amrith serves on the editorial board of Modern Asian Studies and the advisory board of Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics, and he is one of the series editors of the Princeton University Press book series, Histories of Economic Life. Earlier in his career, Amrith was the inaugural Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies and Professor of History at Harvard University from 2015-20, where he also served as co-director of the Joint Center for History and Economics, and Interim Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center (in 2019-20). From 2006-2015, he taught at Birkbeck College, University of London.
President of the Toynbee Prize Foundation Board Glenda Sluga commented on the Board’s selection for 2025: “I am so pleased that Sunil Amrith was awarded the Toynbee Prize this year. He is an extraordinary historian whose probing commitment to questions of global-scale inequality has really broadened our understanding of the global past. He has been extremely enterprising in his attempts to shift how we see the world, in the past but also the present. His commitment to adding unheard voices and making history matter is nowhere more apparent than in his most recent book, The Burning Earth. As always, his view is wide and sharp. His work is global in the most important way, with its profound engagement of a past in which we all have a stake, and a present in which we do not all share equally the consequences.”
Vice President, Heidi Tworek, added that “It's a delight to award the Toynbee Prize to Sunil Amrith, whose wide-ranging and ambitious scholarship has shaped so many strands of global history from health to environment and so much more.”
Amrith is the recipient of the 2024 Fukuoka Academic Prize, awarded to recognize distinguished contributions to the study of Asian cultures; the 2022 Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for History; a “scientific breakthrough of the year” award from the Falling Walls Foundation in 2022; a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship, and the 2016 Infosys Prize in Humanities. In 2024, Amrith was elected an International Fellow of the British Academy.
From March 1, 2025, Amrith will be the Henry R. Luce Director of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. This year, he will deliver the Radhakrishnan Lectures at All Souls College, Oxford in May 2025; the Thyssen lecture at the German Historical Institute London and Trinity College Dublin, in October 2025, and the Wiles Lectures at Queen’s University Belfast in May 2026.
The Toynbee Prize is awarded biennially "for work that makes a significant contribution to the study of global history.” In winning the Prize, Amrith is now a part of a distinguished roster of recent Toynbee Prize recipients, including Jane Burbank, Frederick Cooper, Kenneth Pomeranz, Lauren Benton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Christopher Bayly, Michael Adas, and Jürgen Osterhammel.
Sunil Amrith will deliver the 2025 Toynbee Prize Lecture at the European University Institute in Florence on 12th May 2025. Please follow this space for further details.