Marion W. Dixon, Ph.D.
Chair, Department of Literature, Culture, and Society
Coordinator, Interdisciplinary Studies Program
Coordinator, International and Environmental Studies Program
Associate Professor, Sociology
Contact Information
- Office: 706C Lawrence Hall
- Email: mdixon@pointpark.edu
Education
- Ph.D., Development Sociology, Cornell University
- M.S., Development Sociology, Cornell University
- B.A., Political Science, University of Michigan
Background
I am so grateful for my travels as an undergraduate and throughout my 20s. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, I studied abroad in South Africa and Russia. After I graduated, I backpacked through India, then joined the Peace Corps in Morocco. These experiences led me to pursue a PhD in a PhD program at Cornell University. For my doctorate, I lived in Egypt (from around 2008 to 2011) while researching changes in agriculture and food. That long and unwieldy research led to my first book—check it out here!
I am always happy to talk with students about study abroad, the Peace Corps, and all matters of international travel!
Courses Taught
- Interdisciplinary Studies Practicum
- Interdisciplinary Studies Thesis
- Agriculture and Food Systems
- Sociological Foundations
- World Cultures
- Power, Politics, and Society
Research Interests
- Agriculture
- Food
- International Development
- Middle East and North Africa
- World-Ecology
- Nature-Society Relations
- Dixon, M. W. The Frontiers of Corporate Food in Egypt. Oxford University Press. 2023.
- 'Eek! What the Chick? Addressing the Issues of Industrial Poultry in Egypt.' Tiny Beam Fund, Inc., Issue Lab (open access repository), 2023.
- 'Phosphate fock frontiers: Nature, labor, and imperial states, 1870 – WWII,' Critical Historical Studies 8(2): 271-303. 2021.
- Invited review of Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa: Agrarian Questions in Egypt and Tunisia, by Habib Ayeb and Ray Bush, Journal of Development Studies. 2021.
- 'Agrarian Question Revisited: Smallholders and Corporate Food in Egypt,' special issue ‘Food Security and the Contested Visions of Agrarian Change in Africa,' Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 2020.
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‘Chemical fertilizer in transformations in world agriculture and the state system, 1870 to the interwar period’. Journal of Agrarian Change 18(4): 768-786, 2018.
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‘Riding on Waves of Crises: Finance, Food, and Political Tumult in Egypt’. In Financialisation, Food Systems and Rural Transformation, edited by H. Bjørkhaug, A. Magnan, and G. Lawrence, pp. 135-155. New York: Routledge, 2018.
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‘Plastics and Agriculture in the Desert Frontier’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 37(1): 86-102. 2017.
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‘Biosecurity and the Multiplication of Crises in the Egyptian Agri-food Industry’. Geoforum 61: 90-100. 2015.
- ‘Where is the Processed Food?’, Joint Association for the Study of Food and Society and Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society, Burlington, VT, June 7-10, 2026.
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'The Egyptian Corporate Agri-food System and the World Food Economy,' CEDEJ Cairo, Roundtable/Webinar on Hunger for the Desert: Food, Agri-capitalism and the Environment in Egypt, April 18, 2023.
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‘Food Crises and Revolt’, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, New York, N.Y. Aug. 10-13, 2019.
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‘Chemical Fertilizer in the Making of National Agricultures and National Industries, 1870 – WWII’, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, August 11-14, 2018.
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The modern world economy: frontiers, ecology, commodities’, International Studies Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, April 4-7, 2018.
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‘Land Reclamation and Expanded Commodity Production in the Longue Durée’, Third Annual Conference of the World-Ecology Research Network, Binghamton University, July 21-22, 2017.
- "Climate crisis, climate justice: race, gender, class in the climate crisis," featuring Professor Jason W. Moore, from Binghamton University, marionwdixon.com, April 10, 2019.