Meet the Editor | Lunch and Conversation
Join the Whitney Humanity Center’s Spring 2024 Editor-in-Residence, Sharmila Sen, and Sunil Amrith, the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University, for lunch and a conversation about book publishing in the humanities. RSVP to reserve your spot at lunch.
Sharmila Sen is the Editorial Director and Director of Special Initiatives at Harvard University Press, where she strategizes and oversees the overall book acquisitions program. She welcomes books that make lasting contributions to several fields in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Her recent signings include books on a diverse range of topics—wealth and animal behavior, how the British slave trade shaped modern medicine and health care, the sexiness of consent, political correctness as an accusation, the misunderstood effects of family structure on life outcomes for Black youth, a synthetic biologist’s surprising account of our beloved eukaryote Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a political theorist’s timely reassessment of the notorious psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson, how New York publishers accidentally invented world literature, the untold story behind the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century (Ellmann’s James Joyce), and a curated collection of queer poems by one of America’s leading poetry critics. She is the author of Not Quite Not White: Losing and Finding Race in America (Penguin, 2018).
Sunil 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 published in the fields of environmental history, the history of migration, and the history of public health. Amrith’s new book, to appear in 2024, is The Burning Earth, an environmental history of the modern world that foregrounds the experiences of the Global South. Amrith’s four previous books include Unruly Waters (Basic Books and Penguin UK)—shortlisted for the 2019 Cundill Prize, and reviewed in Nature, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Review of Books—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.