Inaugural “Global History Lecture” to feature Boston University center director

Arkansas State University in Jonesboro will host Boston University professor James C. McCann for the inaugural “Global History Lecture” at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 10, in the Fine Arts Recital Hall, 114 S. Caraway, on the ASU campus.

His lecture at ASU is entitled: “A New Agro-Ecology for Malaria? Corn and the New Landscape of Disease in Africa” Admission is free and open to the public.

Professor McCann is currently an instructor of history and is the director of the African Studies Center at Boston University and a visiting professor of history at Michigan State University.

His research has focused on African agricultural and environmental history, with a particular emphasis on Ethiopia.  His books include: From Poverty to Famine in Northeast Ethiopia (1987); People of the Plow: A Modern History of Highland Agriculture in Ethiopia (1995); and Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land: An Environmental History of Africa (1999). 

People of the Plow was a finalist for the Herskovitz Prize, the most prestigious book prize offered by the African Studies Association.  Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land is used in many African history courses. He is currently finishing a book entitled: Maize and Grace: A History of Maize in the Old World, which is under contract with Harvard University Press. 

Professor McCann has had three Fulbright-Hayes Fellowships, an ACLS Fellowship, and has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina and at the Agrarian Studies Center at Yale University.

During his lecture, McCann will examine the relationship between the arrival of maize (corn) in Africa and the distribution of malaria on the continent. Maize is an American crop and did not arrive in Africa until after the European discovery of the Americas. Historians have long been interested in the beneficial effects of the spread of American crops through the Old World. 

“Professor McCann’s work, which links the spread of maize to a greater prevalence of the mosquito-borne disease malaria, adds an important new wrinkle to previous work on the spread of American crops and gives us a new perspective on one of the world’s most deadly diseases,” said Dr. Erik Gilbert, assistant professor of history.

This event is sponsored by the Department of History with the support of the College Humanities and Social Sciences, the College of Nursing and Health Professions, the College of Sciences and Mathematics, the College of Agriculture, and the Office of Academic Affairs.  

The lecture is the first of a series of annual lectures on global history topics that will support the history department’s new master’s degree in history with global history emphasis. 

For more information, please contact Gilbert in the Department of History at 870-972-3046 or via email at egilbert@astate.edu.

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