James E. McWilliams is currently a fellow in the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University. An associate professor of history at Texas State University, he is the author of three books, A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America (Columbia, 2005), Building the Bay Colony: Economy and Culture in Early Massachusetts (2007), and American Pests: Our Futile Attempt to Conquer the Insect Empire from Colonial Times to the Death of DDT (Columbia, 2008).

His articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. He is a contributing writer for the Texas Observer and, between 2004 and 2006, wrote a column called “Politics and Prose” for the Austin-American Statesman. In 2001 he won the Walter Muir Whitehill Prize in Early American History, awarded by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, and in 2004 was honored with an AltWeekly Award for arts criticism from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN).

McWilliams is at work on his next book: Just Food: A Global Citizen’s Guide to Virtuous Eating, to be published by Little Brown in 2009.