NEWS

Tore Olsson

Robert C. Anderson Memorial Award 2014
Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2014

Tore Olsson, a recent doctoral graduate in history, has made numerous important contributions to the fields of modern U.S. and Mexican political and diplomatic history and transnational history, and he has conducted interdisciplinary scholarship in food, agricultural and environmental studies. His dissertation, “Green Revolutions: The American South, Mexico, and the Twentieth-Century Remaking of the Rural World,” examines the intertwined histories of U.S. and Mexican agrarian reform programs from the early twentieth century to the early Cold War period. Olsson’s multi-sited and multilingual archival research convincingly demonstrates that the roots of the so-called “Green Revolution” were first planted not in the minds of post-World War II development technocrats, but instead in the Rockefeller Foundation’s efforts to tackle rural poverty in the U.S. South during the Progressive Era. Olsson is now working on a book manuscript, and he is an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.