Development and Social Change

Philip McMichael grew up in Adelaide, South Australia, completing undergraduate degrees in economics and in political science at the University of Adelaide. After traveling in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and doing community work in Papua New Guinea, he pursued his doctorate in sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He has taught at the University of New England (New South Wales), Swarthmore College, and the University of Georgia, and he is presently Emeritus Professor of Global Development at Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY. Other appointments include Visiting Senior Research Scholar in International Development at the University of Oxford (Wolfson College) and Visiting Scholar, School of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Queensland.

His book Settlers and the Agrarian Question: Foundations of Capitalism in Colonial Australia (1984) won the Social Science History Association's Allan Sharlin Memorial Award in 1985. In addition to authoring Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions (2013), McMichael edited The Global Restructuring of Agro-Food Systems (1994), Food and Agrarian Orders in the World Economy (1995), New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development (2005) with Frederick H. Buttel, Contesting Development: Critical Struggles for Social Change (2010), The Politics of Biofuels, Land and Agrarian Change (2011) with Jun Borras and Ian Scoones, and Finance or Food? The Role of Cultures, Values and Ethics in Land Use Negotiations, with Hilde Bjorkhaug and Bruce Muirhead (2020).

He has served twice as chair of his department, as director of Cornell University's International Political Economy Program, as chair of the American Sociological Association's Political Economy of the World-System Section, as president of the Research Committee on Agriculture and Food for the International Sociological Association. He is also an active member of the International Studies Association. He has also worked with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Civil Society Mechanism of the FAO's Committee on World Food Security (CFS), the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), the international peasant coalition Via Campesina, and the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty.