Brian Williams
Assistant Professor, Geography
209 Hilbun Hall
Mississippi State, MS 39762
Dr. Brian Williams is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Mississippi State University. Dr. Williams is a broadly-trained human geographer whose work brings together political ecology, critical race scholarship, environmental justice, and agri-food geographies. His research traces the political, cultural, and ecological dimensions of agricultural and environmental change in the United States South. Focusing on the development and legacy of cotton plantation agriculture in the United States South, alongside rich histories of agrarian resistance and community development, his work examines the ideas about race and nature which shape pesticide usage, the continuities between plantation agriculture and contemporary industrial agriculture, and the implications of Black geographies for contemporary agro-environmental justice.
Education
- PhD, The University of Georgia, Department of Geography, 2018
- MA, The Ohio State University, Department of Geography, 2013
- BA, University of Southern Mississippi, Department of Anthropology, 2008
Experience
- Postdoctoral Fellow, Dartmouth College, Department of Geography, 2018-2019
Research Interests
- Political ecology, environmental justice, food justice, health geography, science and technology studies, political geography, economic geography, historical geography, cultural geography, qualitative methodologies, agri-food systems, critical race and ethnic studies, Black geographies, environmental history, oral history, the U.S. South, Latin America.
Teaching Areas
- GR 4263/6263: Geographies of the U.S. South
- GR 4990/6990: Culture, Place, and Power
- GR 2013: Human Geography
Recent Publications
- 2020 Williams, B. 2020. “The Fabric of Our Lives”?: Cotton, Pesticides, and Agrarian Racial Regimes in the U.S. South. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 0 (0):1–18. Published online, and publication in a numbered volume forthcoming.
- 2020 Williams, B. and Riley, M. The Challenge of Oral History to Environmental History. Environment & History. Environment and History 26(2):207–231.
- 2019 Davis, J., Moulton, A., Van Sant, L., and Williams, B. Anthropocene, Capitalocene,...Plantationocene?: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises. Geography Compass 13(5), 1-13.
- 2018 Williams, B. “That We May Live”: Pesticides, Plantations, and Environmental Racism. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(1), 243-267.
- 2018 Bledsoe, A., Eaves, L., Williams, B., and Wright, W. Enacting Black Geographies. The Southeastern Geographer and Project Muse. View More
- 2017 Williams, B. Articulating Agrarian Racism: Statistics and Plantationist Empirics. The Southeastern Geographer 57(1), 12-29.
