History of food and agriculture; Modern U.S. and Latin America; transnational history

Alumnus (Graduate Program)
M.A., University of Georgia, 2007

Office: 310 LeConte
tolsson@uga.edu

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I study the global history of food and agriculture, with a focus on twentieth-century North America. My dissertation will examine how Cold War programs of global rural development, particularly the Green Revolution, emerged out of the transnational conversation between reformers working in the American South and Mexico. In the first half of the twentieth century, rural reformers from diverse backgrounds - Rockefeller Foundation agronomists, Mexican revolutionary agrarians, and New Deal social planners, to name a few - looked across the American Mediterranean for both models and warnings, believing rightly that both Mexico and the U.S. South shared the colonial complexes of plantation agriculture and unequal landownership. But the solutions that reformers proposed for righting these historic wrongs were many and often at odds, ranging from redistributive politics to technocratic science. When this transnational exchange was globalized with the Rockefeller Foundation's push into the postwar Third World, the clash between these multiple visions was especially stark, and the fate of the rural planet lay in their resolution.

In 2011-2012, I was an International Dissertation Research Fellow with the Social Science Research Council. In 2012-2013, I will be a Fellow in Technology and Democracy at the University of Virgina's Miller Center, funded by the Ambrose Monell Foundation. I have previously written and published work on ethnic food vendors in Atlanta, labor relations in Georgia's poultry industry since World War II, and the globalization of the Vidalia onion.

Research and Teaching Interests

Dissertation

MA Thesis

Selected Publications

"Your DeKalb Farmers Market: Food and Ethnicity in Atlanta," in Cornbread Nation 5: The Best of Southern Food Writing, ed. Fred Sauceman and John T. Edge (University of Georgia Press, 2010) More Info

"Your DeKalb Farmers Market: Food and Ethnicity in Atlanta," Southern Cultures (Winter 2007)

Honors and Awards

Mira Wilkins Prize, Business History Conference, Best article on international business history (2013)

Dissertation Completion Fellowship (declined), Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) (2012-2013)

Warner-Fite Scholarship in History, UGA History Department, Presented to an outstanding graduate student in American/U.S. history (2012)

Dean's Award in Arts and Humanities, UGA Graduate School (2011)

Grant-in-Aid, Rockefeller Archive Center (2011)

Graduate Field Research Award, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute, UGA (2011)

International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Social Science Research Council (2011)

Research Fellowship for the Study of the Global South, New Orleans Gulf South Center at Tulane University (2011)

William Jennings Bryan Award, UGA History Department, Best History Paper of the Year (2009)

Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Georgia (2008)

Carl Vipperman Teaching Assistant Award, UGA History Department (2007)

Best Paper at the History and Power Across American Borders Conference, Graduate History Association of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (2006)

Courses Taught