Jonathan Harwood

Jonathan Harwood was born in the US (1943) and educated at Wesleyan University. Following a year abroad at the Universität Würzburg, he took his doctorate (molecular biology) at Harvard. Emigrating to the UK in 1970, he studied sociology at Bristol University before moving to the University of Manchester where he taught history and sociology of science and technology, with sabbaticals in Berlin and Cambridge (Mass.), until retiring in 2008.

Although a historian of genetics throughout most of his career, his interests over the last two decades have shifted markedly. He is now best described as a historian of technology with a general interest in the political economy of technical change and a particular interest in agricultural “revolutions” since the nineteenth century in both the global North and South. His most recent book is Europe’s Green Revolution and Others Since: the Rise and Fall of Peasant-Friendly Plant Breeding (London: Routledge, 2016). Since retirement he has worked for the most part as a public historian, publishing critical studies of “the Green Revolution” in journals of development studies and sustainable agriculture.