BOOK:

Environment, Knowledge, and Injustice in Lesotho: The Poverty of Progress. Suffolk, UK: James Currey, 2024.

Both place-based environmental history and global intellectual history, this book explores the politics of environment, agriculture, poverty, development, and science in Lesotho. Drawing on diverse experiences with this landlocked, mountainous nation, and based on bilingual archival and oral history research in Sesotho and English, the book examines how Basotho intellectuals, farmers, migrant workers, chiefs, experts, and politicians formed vernacular ideas of tsoelopele (progress) amid the structural violence of colonialism and capitalism in southern Africa. Rather than a unidirectional flow of ‘enlightened’ knowledge from Europe to Africa, the study shows that a fraught historical process was at work in which Basotho drew on local and global sources of knowledge, from ancestral agricultural practices to colonial soil science and from African American missionaries to African nationalists in Ghana. Basotho ideas about tsoelopele, it is argued, informed the many political, social, and environmental innovations that enabled survival within a sea of white supremacy and that underpin approaches to development in independent Lesotho. Throughout, the book shows how this small nation surrounded by South Africa can serve as a valuable case-study for wider conversations about ‘progress’ and ‘modernization’ in the Global South.

SCHOLARLY ARTICLES & BOOK CHAPTERS:

“Stick to thy Hillock?: James Machobane and the Problem of Agroecology in Lesotho,” in J. Carruthers, N. Jacobs, G. Winn, eds., Environment, Power, and Justice: Southern African Histories, Ohio University Press, 2022.

“(Un)Cultivating the Disease of Maize: Pellagra, Policy, and Nutrition Practice in Lesotho, 1933-1963,” Journal of Southern African Studies 46.3 (2020): 509-526.

“Sheep, Scab Mites, and Society The Process and Politics of Veterinary Knowledge in Lesotho, Southern Africa, c. 1900-1933,” Environment & History 26.3 (2020): 383-412.

“Origins and Pathways of Agricultural Demonstration in Lesotho, Southern Africa, 1924-1960s,” Agricultural History 93.2 (2019): 233-263.

FULBRIGHT SCHOLAR RESEARCH, SOUTH AFRICA, 2024-25:

Project title: “Cultivating Change: Visionary Farmers and the Public Imagination in South Africa
During nine months based at the University of the Free State (UFS), I will examine the history of the ideas, methods, organizations, and networks of visionary farmers in South Africa. Visionary farmers have long worked for what we now call food sovereignty by practicing forms of agroecology. But there is debate about how, and if, food sovereignty and agroecology can alleviate poverty and heal a sick planet. Taking South Africa as a case study from 1970 to 2020, I will be collaborating with colleagues at UFS and elsewhere in the region to examine oral, written, and visual evidence to produce oral archives, presentations, and publications that can illuminate this debate through historical perspective.

POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH, 2017-18:

In 2017-18, I conducted field research to begin a new project while developing my dissertation into a book manuscript as a post-doctoral fellow at an initiative called Innovative Methods and Metrics for Agriculture and Nutrition Actions. IMMANA is based out of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. As a fellow, I returned to Lesotho, South Africa , and the UK for further research into the social and environmental history of pellagra, a nutritional disease that has emerged in populations where refined maize meal has been the staple food. As an historian, I reconstructed the various parts of the historical period in the 1950s and 60s where this condition flourished: the political economy of food systems, climate variability, crop choices, and food preferences. Understanding how these factors fit together in the past, affords a better sense of how to create agriculture and nutrition policy in the present.