Tom Okie

William Thomas Okie (Tom) is Professor of History and History Education at Kennesaw State University, where he teaches pedagogy, research methods, and modern US history, and serves as Program Coordinator of the BS in History Education. He earned his PhD in history from the University of Georgia and taught at Bowdoin College in Maine before coming to KSU in 2013. He is the author of The Georgia Peach: Culture, Agriculture, and Environment in the American South (Cambridge University Press, 2016), co-winner of the Malcolm Bell, Jr., and Muriel Barrow Bell Award for the best book in Georgia history published in 2016 and 2017 from the Georgia Historical Society. His current book project, Wayside: The Hidden Histories of Ordinary Plants, to be published by the University of North Carolina Press, earned a Public Scholar award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Email: wokie1@kennesaw.edu
Website: https://facultyweb.kennesaw.edu/wokie1/index.php

 

MAST Courses Taught:

• AMST 7460: Movements in American Culture: Food in American History

Select Publications:

• The Georgia Peach: Culture, Environment, and Agriculture in the American
  South, Cambridge Studies on the American South (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
  
  
• “Writing History in Place: An Introduction” (with Andrew C. Baker), Agricultural History 99, no. 4 (Nov. 2025): 509–35.
  
  
• “The Parable of the Railway Agent: Stories of Progress and Winter Legumes in the Twentieth-Century South,” Rethinking History25, no. 1, History as Creative Writing (Jan. 2021): 37–50. https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/86H4WISUBXEYCKDPVXYW/full?target=10.1080/13642529.2020.1829863
  
  
• “The Thin Ripe Line: Watermelons, Pushcarts, and the Distribution of Modern Food,” in Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food, ed. Benjamin Cohen, Michael Kideckel, and Anna Zeide (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021), https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/acquired-tastes
  
  
• “Beauty and Habitation: Fredrika Bremer and the Aesthetic Imperative of Environmental History,” Environmental History 24, no. 2 (April 2019): 258–81. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1093/envhis/emy130
  
  
• “Amber Waves of Broomsedge,” Southern Cultures 25, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 58–71. http://www.southerncultures.org/article/amber-waves-of-broomsedge/