Join the Russell Library for a panel featuring Drs. James C. Giesen, Associate Professor of History and Grisham Master Teacher, Mississippi State University, and Derek Alderman, Professor of Geography, University of Tennessee. Discussion will include the social, cultural, and economic impact of notorious pests such as the boll weevil and kudzu in modern Georgia. Dr. Brian Drake, Senior Lecturer, Department of History, University of Georgia, will moderate the event.
About the speakers:
Derek H. Alderman is Professor and former Department Head in Geography at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is a past President of the American Association of Geographers and co-founder of Tourism RESET, an interdisciplinary, multi-university initiative advocating for social/racial justice in travel, tourism, and hospitality. Dr. Alderman is the author or editor of three books along with writing over 140 articles, chapters, and other essays that interpret the historical, symbolic, and political dimensions of the South—from civil rights memorials, slavery and plantation museums, and Black automobility to place renaming struggles, hurricane graffiti, Elvis geographies, and the cultural geographies of the kudzu vine. The National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities have funded Dr. Alderman’s scholarship. He is the recipient of several regional and national awards for research, teaching, and public outreach and numerous media outlets have interviewed or quoted him, including MSNBC, New York Times, CityLab, Washington Post, USA Today, The Guardian, NBA on TNT, and National Public Radio.
James C. Giesen is a historian specializing in the environmental and agricultural history of the United States South. After earning his Ph.D. at the University of Georgia in 2004, he was hired by the History Department at Mississippi State University to help build a research focus and graduate program in rural, environmental, and agricultural history. His book Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South (University of Chicago Press, 2011) was awarded the Deep South Book Prize and the Francis B. Simkins Award. His journal articles have won awards from the Agricultural History Society and the Southern Historical Association. He is currently working on a cultural and environmental history of cotton in the South. Giesen has been named a Gulmon Eminent Scholar by the College of Arts and Sciences at MSU and named a John Grisham Master Teacher, the university’s highest teaching honor. He also serves as the editor of the “Environmental History and the American South” book series at the University of Georgia Press.
Brian Allen Drake specializes in environmental history. His recent research focuses on the postwar American environmental movement, particularly its relationship to postwar politics and ideology, and on the environmental history of the American Civil War. The University of Washington Press published his book, Loving Nature, Fearing the State: Environmentalism and Antigovernment Politics Before Reagan, in August 2013 in its Weyerhaeuser Environmental Series. He is also the editor of The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War, published by UGA Press in January 2015. Drake has published articles in Great Plains Quarterly, the Georgia Historical Quarterly, and Environmental History, and also contributed a chapter to Barry Goldwater and the Remaking of the American Political Landscape, published by the University of Arizona Press. He is currently writing a comparative chapter on the environmental histories of the Civil War and World War I for a forthcoming edited collection, as well as another chapter on the future of Civil War environmental history for a forthcoming festschrift in honor of his doctoral adviser Donald Worster. During the 2015-16 academic year, Drake was one of the UGA Library's inaugural Special Collections Library Fellows, and in 2017 he was one of the inaugural Fellows for Innovative Teaching with UGA's Center for Teaching and Learning. In May 2016 he was the first-ever recipient of the Amanda and Greg Gregory Undergraduate Teaching Award. Prior to arriving at UGA in 2007, Drake taught for two years in the Humanities and Western Civilization program at the University of Kansas. He earned his B.A. in history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and his M.A. in U.S. history from the University of Georgia.
Event made possible with generous support from the Lamartine G. Hardman III Endowment and the Russell Programming Endowment.