He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Georgia, and has taught at Millsaps College and served as a research fellow for the Wormsloe Institute for Environmental History. He is the author of Remaking Wormsloe Plantation: The Environmental History of a Lowcountry Landscape (Georgia, 2012), as well as a number of articles on the southern environment, food, and agriculture. Among his awards and honors are the 2013 Malcolm Bell, Jr., and Muriel Barrow Bell Book Award, the 2011 C. Vann Woodward Prize from the Southern Historical Association for the best dissertation on the history of the American South, and the 2009 Theodore C. Blegen Award from the Forest History Society. His next book, A Golden Weed: Tobacco and Environment in the American South, is forthcoming with Yale University Press. He currently lives with his wife and son in Centerville, Ohio.