I am the Buttel-Sewell Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology and the Director of the Food Studies Network at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I am affiliated with the History Department, the Gender and Women’s Studies Department, the Afro-American Studies Department, and the Program in Public Humanities.
My research and teaching examine the history of global capitalism and how people have lived and struggled within and against it. I have a PhD in history from the University of Minnesota and have longstanding commitments to cultural, anti-racist, ethnic, labor, queer, and gender studies that inform how I approach any subject. As a humanities scholar housed in the College of Agriculture, I pursue a radical interdisciplinarity that can integrate knowledge (and news!) from poetry with botany and analyses of marketing (just for example). I am committed to the future of public higher education and sometimes write about that, too.
My most recent book is Cigarettes Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism (Chicago, 2018), winner of the 2019 Albert J. Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association.
Email nenstad[@]wisc[dot]edu
