Our current spotlight highlights the monthly Dirty History Workshop series. Organizers: Brian Drake, Cindy Hahamovitch, Pablo Lapegna, Scott Nelson, Dan Rood, and Timothy Yang, and Terrell Orr (graduate student representative). Organized in 2016, Dirty History is an interdisciplinary workshop for scholars working at the intersection of agriculture, environment, and capitalism. Histories of food and farming have reemerged as an important topic in recent years. The impact of anthropogenic climate change on global food supply, debates around GMOs and industrial agriculture, food deserts for minority communities in the United States, and the struggles of migrant farmworkers have all sparked new kinds of research at the intersection of history, geography, anthropology, and literary criticism. Food studies has also encouraged humanistic scholars to cross the border into scientific fields like ecology, soil science, archeology, plant biology, genomics, and engineering. To provide a space for the further development of interdisciplinary, historically-grounded scholarship around issues of agriculture, environment, and capitalism, the organizers of “Dirty History” invite both faculty and advanced graduate students to submit papers for a monthly workshop in which visiting researchers can share their ideas and arguments with other scholars already working in the field.
