about

I am an environmental historian of global Asia investigating entanglements of climate, environments, economies, and violence.

My research draws on case studies from ‘mainland monsoon Asia’: the vast swathe of South, Southeast, and East Asia governed by Asia’s two major monsoon systems.

I will defend my PhD dissertation, Flood and Timber: Mapping Climate, Commerce, and Conflict Across the Heart of Monsoon Asia, 1885 – 1975, in June 2026 in the History Department of Princeton University.

In 2020, I completed my first MA in History at Tufts University, with a special focus on the history and political economy of modern South Asia. My masters thesis, Arc of Complacency, told the story of ill-fated Soviet attempts to spread softpower across Southeast Asia.

Before graduate school, I lived in Burma (Myanmar), where I worked as a teacher and grant writer.

I moved there as a Volunteers in Asia Global Community Fellow in 2013, one month after finishing my undergraduate degree.

I spent the next four years working alongside activists and specialists to revitalize Myanmar’s education sector during a period of political reform from decades military dictatorship.

Two of those years were spent living at a Theravada Buddhist monastery in Mandalay, helping a monastic education group launch a liberal arts college pilot project.

While Myanmar’s lowland cities of the mid 2010s were full of hope during a heady political spring, the country’s upland towns and villages were still marked by the slow, roiling violence of the world’s longest-running ongoing civil war. The violence was so widespread that even I, as a foreigner, got caught in it from time to time.

The violence could be slow and eerie: traveling between major lowland cities, long distance buses were stopped in the night by uniformed soldiers conducting document and contraband checks. But slow violence could turn frenzied in an instant. In upland areas, unmarked checkpoints were fashioned from spools of razor wire stretched across entire roads. Armed men, unidentifiable in tank tops, jeans, and flip flops, would emerge from the forest, rifles slung across their shoulders, to surround the car or van until windows were lowered and papers proffered. I have been witness to one firefight and two shelling attacks.

These firsthand brushes with armed conflict compelled me to apply to graduate school. But it wasn’t the violence that intruiged me so much as people’s reactions to it. Even more disturbing than the violence I witnessed was the icy nonchalance displayed by everyone else caught in the clashes.

How did politics and society in Burma become so warped that perpetual violence is treated as normal?

© 2025 Michael Mandelkorn.

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