Roundtable: Why Does Agricultural History Matter?

BRIAN DONAHUE is Associate Professor of American Environmental Studies at Brandeis University, and a Massachusetts farmer.

ANNE EFFLAND is a senior economist with the US Department of Agriculture’s Office of the Chief Economist and has served as a social scientist and historian at the USDA since 1990. She is a former president and Fellow of the Agricultural History Society and a recipient of the Society’s Gladys Baker Award for lifetime achievement in the field of agricultural history.

EDDA L. FIELDS-BLACK is an associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (2008) and Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and the Civil War Transformation of the Gullah Geechee (forthcoming); and co-editor, with Francesca Bray, Peter Coclanis, and Dagmar Schafer, of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories (2015). She is executive producer and librettist of “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice.”

PRAKASH KUMAR is an associate professor of history at Pennsylvania State University. He is currently writing a book on the history of agrarian development in India in the twentieth century.

PETER LAVELLE is an assistant professor of history at Temple University. His first book, The Profits of Nature: Colonial Development and the Quest for Resources in Nineteenth-Century China, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

JAMES LIN is an assistant professor of international studies and adjunct assistant professor of history at the University of Washington. He is working on his first book, a history of Taiwanese agrarian development in the Global South during the twentieth century.

BEN NOBBS-THIESSEN is a postdoctoral scholar in the History Department at Washington State University. His forthcoming 2020 book Landscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia’s Tropical Frontier since 1952 explores the transnational trajectories that brought Mennonite, Andean and Okinawan settlers to the forested fringes of Amazonia and the Gran Chaco.

DEBRA A. REID is Curator of Agriculture and the Environment at The Henry Ford, Dearborn, Michigan. Her publications include Reaping a Greater Harvest: African Americans, the Extension Service, and Rural Reform in Jim Crow Texas (2007); Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families since Reconstruction (2012), co-edited with Evan P. Bennett; Interpreting Agriculture at Museums and Historic Sites (2017); and Interpreting the Environment at Museums and Historic Sites (2019), co-written with David D. Vail.

THOMAS D. ROGERS is associate professor of History at Emory University and currently the Arthur Blank/NEH Chair in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences. The Agricultural History Society awarded his first book, The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil (UNC Press, 2010), the Wallace Prize. Rogers is finishing a book on agricultural modernization and biofuel production in Brazil.

BOBBY J. SMITH II is a sociologist and currently a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the relationship between African American food systems, food justice, agriculture, race, and inequality in historical and contemporary contexts. He holds degrees from Prairie View A&M and Cornell University.

STEVEN STOLL is professor of history at Fordham University. He is the author of Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia, published in 2017.

MARY SUMMERS is a senior fellow with the Fox Leadership Program and a lecturer in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She has written articles for The Nation, Urban Affairs Quarterly, Political Science and Politics, Agricultural History and several edited volumes; her ongoing book project is entitled Organizing Farmers: Building the American State.

NICOLA VERDON is professor of modern British history at Sheffield Hallam University. She has published widely on gender and labor in British agriculture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

NICOLE WELK-JOERGER is a PhD candidate in the History and Sociology of Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her current research focuses on human-animal relations in food production.