Nan Enstad

Nan Enstad is an interdisciplinary historian and rural sociologist of capitalism, agriculture and food. Throughout her career, she has worked at the interface between capitalism and daily life, focusing on the US garment industry, the global tobacco industry and more recently intensive animal agriculture and agroecology. She has a PhD in history and is the author of two books, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Popular Culture and Labor Politics (1999) and Cigarettes Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism. She moved from the UW history department to Community and Environmental Sociology in 2020 and currently serves as Department Chair. She has three research projects in progress: “What is a Farmer?” a study of contemporary rural environmental controversies in Wisconsin around the intensification of animal agriculture; “The Capitalist Imagination and the Second Scientific Revolution,” an intellectual and cultural history of transformations in modes of scientific and humanistic thought in the context of environmental catastrophe. The third project is applied research in agroecology with farmers in Wisconsin who are rebuilding local and regional food chains. She teaches CES 341 Labor in Global Food Systems and CES 222 Food Culture and Society and mentors graduate students in the Joint Sociology Graduate Program, the History Graduate Program, and the Agroecology Graduate Program.