Courtney Fullilove is Assistant Professor of History and affiliated faculty in the Science in Society Program and the College of the Environment at Wesleyan University, where she teaches nineteenth-century U.S. social history, environmental history, and the history of science and technology in global perspective. She researches practices now gathered under the rubric of world development: sustainability, biodiversity, intellectual property law, traditional knowledge, and cultural heritage. Her book in progress is about seeds, and who owns them, focusing on the case of US agricultural development in the 19th century. Her teaching and research in the 2013-14 academic year focuses on world food systems, agrobiodiversity, and food security. She has additional research interests in the history of bureaucracy.
During the 2012-13 academic year, Fullilove was a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany.
Since 2010 Fullilove has accompanied international teams of genetic resource specialists from Syria, Russia, Tajikistan, Georgia, Armenia, Australia, and New Zealand on biodiversity collection missions targeting traditional varieties and wild relatives of cereal crops. This research will be the subject of her Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis Program on Networks of Exchange: Mobilities of Knowledge in a Globalized World in 2014.
Courses Taught:
Food Security: History of an Idea
Industrializations: Commodities in World History
Social Life of the Modern Fact
American Food
Materia Medica
Confidence and Panic
The Long 19th Century in the United States
Recent Talks:
“The New York City Flour Riot and the Paradox of Capitalist World Food Systems” at the Graduate School of North American Studies conference “Claiming Space: Reconfigurations in Times of Crisis,” Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany (May 2013).
“The Political Geography of Biodiversity” at Mellon Biennial Zuckerman Conference, Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE), Columbia University, New York, New York (April 2013).
“The Unlikely (and Murderous) Case of Patents on False Teeth in 19th-Century America” at the Society for the History of Technology Annual Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark (October 2012).
