Rate My Professor Tom Okie

William Thomas “Tom” Okie serves as Coordinator of the Undergraduate History Education Program and Professor of History Education and History in the Department of History and Philosophy at Kennesaw State University. A historian of agriculture, environment, and the modern United States, he grew up in middle Georgia and studied history at Covenant College and the University of Georgia, where he received training in environmental and agricultural history. Okie joined Kennesaw State University in 2013 following a year teaching American and environmental history at Bowdoin College in 2012-2013. Before pursuing graduate studies, he taught English for Speakers of Other Languages in rural Honduras and seventh-grade social studies in northwest Georgia. At Kennesaw State, he teaches a range of courses including HIST 2112: U.S. History since 1877, HIST 3100/6100: Historical Methods, HIST 7900: Technology for Historians and History Educators, HIST 3271: Introduction to History Education, HIST 4550/4560: Methods of History Education, HIST 4490/AMST 7460: Food in American History, and HIST 4163: U.S. between the World Wars.

Okie’s scholarship centers on the intersections of culture, agriculture, poverty, improvement, land, and landscape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His first book, The Georgia Peach: Culture, Agriculture, and Environment in the American South (Cambridge University Press, 2016), earned the Georgia Historical Society’s Bell Award in 2018, its highest publication honor for Georgia history. His publications also include “The Thin Ripe Line: Watermelons, Pushcarts, and the Distribution of Modern Food” in Acquired Tastes (MIT Press, 2021), “Agriculture and Rural Life in the South, 1900–1945” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (2020), “Southern Environmental History” in Reinterpreting Southern Histories (Louisiana State University Press, 2020), “Beauty and Habitation: Fredrika Bremer and the Aesthetic Imperative of Environmental History” (Environmental History, 2019), “Amber Waves of Broomsedge” (Southern Cultures, 2019), and “Under the Trees: The Georgia Peach and the Quest for Labor in the Twentieth Century” (Agricultural History, 2011), which received the Agricultural History Society’s Everett E. Edwards Award. His work has won prizes from the Society of American Historians, the Southern Historical Association, and the Agricultural History Society. Okie serves as associate editor of the journal Agricultural History. Currently, he is completing a second book under contract with the University of North Carolina Press exploring the natural and cultural histories of common American plants such as eastern red cedar and broomsedge. He has collaborated on interdisciplinary projects, including an environmental theater performance at the KSU Field Station drawing on the site’s history as a former cement-mixing plant.