Kamil Ahsan is a 5th-year doctoral student in history at Yale University, with a prior doctorate in biology from the University of Chicago. His current work focuses on the intellectual histories of “reef” ontologies in peripheral reef regions, specifically Sri Lanka, Belize, and the Gulf of Mexico. Working at the intersection of environmental, intellectual, energy, and labor history, his work is an attempt to understand how ways of seeing reefs formed and commodified across the 20th century to the present. He is also a writer and critic. He is the Editor of South Asian Avant-Garde, and his work has appeared in NPR, The Nation, the L.A. Review of Books, Dissent, the Boston-Globe, and The Baffler, among others.