Acknowledgments

We began the work that would become this volume in late 2019, only to see its development slowed in the tumult of the pandemic years that followed. We are deeply grateful to our contributing authors, who stuck with the project despite disrupted research plans, zoomified workshop meetings, and all the other delays and upheavals the pandemic entailed. The initial workshop was planned as part of Helen’s Wellcome Trust Investigator Award (grant no. 217968/Z/19/Z). We thank the Wellcome Trust for its support of her research program, including research and editorial work on this volume, and Dr. Jessica J. Lee, who helped organize the virtual workshop held in June 2021. We also extend thanks to the B&B Stern Foundation for its support of the Kranzberg professorship at Georgia Tech, funds from which enabled this volume to be published Open Access. We are especially grateful to Robert Hampson of Georgia Tech, Lucy Rhymer of Cambridge University Press, and their colleagues who facilitated the Open Access publication process. We also thank the summer stipend program through the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the Faculty Development Grant Committee and the Alworth Center for the Study of Peace and Justice at the College of St. Scholastica, for contributing to the funding of Tim’s research efforts.

This book had its earliest origins in our meeting at the Agrarian Studies seminar at Yale University in 2019 and discovering then that we had mutual interests in the history of CGIAR. We have both been influenced beyond measure by the Agrarian Studies community. We acknowledge our indebtedness to this community, and to Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan and James Scott in particular. The painting by Scott of migrant farm laborers on this edition’s cover pointedly humanizes a global food system that is all-too-often dehumanizing. It serves as a reminder of the need for scholarship that does the same, in the service of creating more just and equitable ways of feeding the world.