Roundtable: New Narratives of the Green Revolution

Prakash Kumar is Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is a specialist of the history of South Asia, history of science, and development studies. His interest lies in the agro-ecological histories of colonial and postcolonial India. He is currently working on two book projects. One of the books investigates the evolving relationship between American technic and agricultural and rural projects of development in India between 1912 and 1972. His second book investigates the nature of contemporary grassroots movements in India that are opposed to the expansion of bioengineered crops.

Timothy Lorek is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Yale University and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Humanities Institute of the New York Botanical Gardens. He is also co-organizer of the international conference, “Traveling Technocrats: Experts and Expertise in Latin America’s Long Cold War,” held at Yale University in October 2016 and from which he is co-editing a forthcoming volume. His research examines transnational circuits of agricultural science, landscape transformation, and agrarian politics in Colombia’s Cauca Valley.

Tore C. Olsson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee. His first book, Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside, was published by Princeton University Press in July 2017. Olsson has been an active member of the AHS since 2010.

Nicole Sackley is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Richmond. Her articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, History and Technology, Journal of Global History, and Modern Intellectual History. She is completing a book entitled Development Fields: American Social Scientists and the Practice of Modernization during the Cold War.

Sigrid Schmalzer is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches Chinese history and the history of science. Her second book, Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China, was published by University of Chicago Press in 2016, and a volume she co-edited, Science for the People: Documents from America’s Movement of Radical Scientists, is forthcoming in 2017 from University of Massachusetts Press. Her current research examines continuities and changes in the politics of food and agricultural knowledge production in socialist and postsocialist China.

Gabriela Soto Laveaga is Professor of History of Science at Harvard University. Her current research interests are scientific knowledge production and circulation in Latin America and India, medical professionals and social movements, and science and development projects in the twentieth century. Her first book, Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill, won the Robert K. Merton Best Book prize in Science, Knowledge, and Technology Studies from the American Sociological Association. Her second monograph, Sanitizing Rebellion: Physician Strikes, Public Health, and Repression in Twentieth Century Mexico, examines the role of healthcare providers as both critical actors in the formation of modern states and as social agitators.