William Moseley of Macalester College will present “The Causes and Consequences of the 2008 Global Food Crisis in West Africa: Neoliberal Policy Reform and Food Security in West Africa” for the annual Douglas C. Ridgley Distinguished Geography Lecture at 4 p.m. Thursday, March 17, in the Old Main Room of the Bone Student Center.

The talk is free and open to the public.

A professor of geography, Moseley is the co-author of the new book Africa’s Green Revolution: Critical Perspectives on New Agricultural Technologies and Systems. Moseley’s research and teaching focus on areas such as food security and land reform in Sub-Saharan Africa, with extended experience in Mali, Niger, Botswana, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Malawi, and Lesotho.

Known as a human-environment and development geographer, Moseley’s research includes examining the political ecology of tropical agriculture. He has collaborated on several other books, including Land Reform in South Africa: An Uneven Transformation and Hanging by a Thread: Cotton, Globalization and Poverty in Africa. His scholarly work is published in multiple journals, such as African Geographical Review, Applied Geography, Dialogues in Human Geography, Geoforum, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Moseley has published more than 30 book chapters and encyclopedia entries, including his recent entry on “Dependency Theory,” which will soon be published in the International Encyclopedia of Geography. Moseley also serves as the associate editor of the journal Food Policy.

His studies have been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Womadix Foundation, and the W.M. Keck Foundation. Moseley is the recipient of the 2013 Media Achievement Award from the Association of American Geographers, and writes a monthly column on agriculture and the environment for Al Jazeera–English.

He received a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Georgia.

The Douglas C. Ridgley Lecture is sponsored by the Department of Geography-Geology Douglas Clay Ridgley Lecture Series through a generous gift from the George and Martha Means family. Those who need special accommodation to fully participate in this program/event can contact the Department of Geography-Geology at (309) 438-7649. Allow sufficient time to arrange the accommodation.