Sherman Emerging Scholar Lecture at UNC Wilmington to Explore "Green Revolutions" and Environmental History Oct. 15
10/7/2009 11:36:16 AM
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Edward Melillo, assistant professor of history and environmental studies at Amherst College, will discuss "Green Revolutions: Agricultural Expansion and the Global Environment in Three Centuries" during the eighth annual Sherman Emerging Scholar Lecture at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 15 in the Warwick Center on the campus of the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Free and open to the public, the event will include a post-lecture reception.
Melillo's lecture will examine several "Green Revolutions" over the course of the past three centuries and offer new ways of using global environmental history to better understand changing land-use practices, shifting labor regimes and long-term geopolitical transformations. During the first Green Revolution, which took place between the 1840s and the 1930s, Peru and Chile exported millions of tons of nitrogen-rich guano and sodium nitrate from remote parts of South America's west coast to places as far flung as California, North Carolina, Prussia and Great Britain. The Second Green Revolution, in the second half of the 20th Century, included a controversial array of programs and policies that brought high-yield seeds, intensive irrigation techniques, farm mechanization, pesticides and petrochemical fertilizers to parts of the developing world.
"For farmers in North America and Europe, crop yields exploded during the latter phases of the Industrial Revolution, helping to diversify and shape the rapidly expanding global economy," Melillo said. "Today, we are witnessing the emergence of yet another Green Revolution. Farmers across the developing world are currently searching for new techniques for increasing crop yields, maintaining soil fertility and revitalizing marginal lands."
Melillo was chosen as the 2009 Sherman Emerging Scholar through a national competition of junior university faculty. The award is given each year by the UNC Wilmington Department of History to an exceptional young scholar whose research is highly relevant to the current global situation and who is able to put important international issues into a meaningful historical context, according to Taylor Fain, a faculty member in the history department and chair of the Sherman committee.
Melillo earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2006 and his B.A. from Swarthmore in 1997. He has held a range of prestigious fellowships and appointments over the course of his young academic career, including visiting professorships at Franklin and Marshall College, and Oberlin, and research fellowships at University of San Francisco Center for the Pacific Rim, the Huntington Library and the Chilean National Library and National Archives.
Media contact:
Dana Fischetti, media relations manager, 910.962.7259 or fischettid@uncw.edu
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Edward Melillo 1
Edward Melillo 2
Edward Melillo head shot
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