Peter A. Coclanis is Albert R. Newsome Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the Global Research Institute at UNC-Chapel Hill. He took his Ph.D. at Columbia in 1984 and joined the faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill that same year. He is an economic historian, and over the course of his career he has published widely in global history and on themes relating to the economic history, agricultural history, and demographic history of both the U.S. South and Southeast Asia. In 1997-98 he was President of the Agricultural History Society (AHS), is an elected Fellow of this society. In 2019 the AHS awarded him its Gladys L. Baker Award for lifetime achievements in the field of agricultural history. He received a similar honor from the Chinese Agricultural Museum/Chinese Agricultural History Society in 2001 as well as an honorary concurrent professorship at the Museum. Among his works on agriculture in the U.S. South are The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920 (Oxford University Press, 1989), which won the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians, and a co-authored Plantation Kingdom: The American South and Its Global Commodities (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). More recently, he wrote the essay “Agribusiness” in the award-winning Companion to American Agricultural History, ed. R. Douglas Hurt (Wiley-Blackwell, 2022).
