Friday, April 1   Dodds Auditorium in Robertson Hall

9:45 to 10 a.m.   Welcome

• Anne A. Cheng, Princeton University
  Opening Remarks

10 a.m. to Noon   Panel 1: Edible Technologies

• Allison Carruth, UCLA
  “The Culinary Lab”
• Rachel Field, representing Harvard University’s David Edwards
  “Digitizing Scent”
• Jennifer Brody, Stanford University
  “Something About Sugar”
• Respondent: Fabio Parasecoli, The New School

1:30 to 3:30 p.m.   Panel 2: Racial (In)Digestion

• Marcia Chatelain, Georgetown University
  “Burgers in the Age of Black Capitalism: Fast Food and Civil Rights in the 1970s”
• Heather Lee, MIT
  “To Dine Like One of the Boys: Female Access to New York City Restaurants, 1905-1929”
• Ashley Rose Young, Duke University
  “Feeding the Crescent City: Public Markets and the Making of the Modern American Palate, 1910-1946”
• Respondent: Amy Bentley, New York University

4 to 5:30 p.m.   Keynote

• Kyla Wazana Tomkpins, Pomona College
  “Against Food”

Saturday, April 2   McCormick Hall, Room 101

9:45 to 10 a.m.   Welcome

• Smitha Haneef, Campus Dining
  “Introduction to Theory and Practice”

10 a.m. to Noon   Panel 3: Citizenship/Sovereignty

• Elizabeth Hoover, Brown University
  “Feeding Our Identity: Defining Food Sovereignty Within the Native American Food Movement”
• Arun Saldanha, University of Minnesota
  “Food Under the Biopolitical Anthropocene: Colonial Pasts, Scary Futures”
• Sarah D. Wald, University of Oregon
  “Zumba in the Fields: What Food Studies Tells Us About Farmworkers, Fit Citizenship, and the Neoliberal Security State”
• Respondent: Miguel Angel Centeno, Princeton University

1:30 to 3:30 p.m.   Panel 4: Affect and the Sensorial

• Neetu Khanna, University of Southern California
  “The Visceral Logics of Decolonization”
• J. Michelle Coghlan, University of Manchester
  “Archiving the Senses”
• Parama Roy, UC Davis
  “The Vegetarian Gothic”
• Respondent: Zahid R. Chaudhary, Princeton University

4 to 5:30 p.m.   Keynote

• Heather Paxson, MIT
  “Scaling Food Politics: Notes on the Ecologies of Production of America’s Food System”

Keynotes

Heather Paxson
Professor, Department of Anthropology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Author of Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece (University of California Press, 2004) and The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value In America (University of California Press, 2012). Her work focuses on how people craft a sense of themselves as moral beings through everyday practices, especially those activities having to do with family and food, and her recent work explores domestic artisanal cheese and the people who make it, analyzing how craftwork has become a new source of cultural and economic value within American landscapes of production and consumption.

Kyla Wazana Tompkins
Associate Professor, Department of English and Program in Gender and Women’s Studies, Pomona College

Author of Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (NYU Press, 2012), winner of the 2012 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize by the American Studies Association and Best Book in Food Studies, presented by the Association of the Study of Food and Society. Her research interests include American studies; food studies; 19th-century literature and cultural history; and feminist, queer and critical race theory. She is completing her second book, presently titled: “So Moved: Texture, Sensation, Biopolitics.”

Speakers

Jennifer DeVere Brody
Professor, Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford University

Author of Impossible Purities (Duke University Press, 1998) and Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play (Duke University Press, 2008), which discuss relations among and between sexuality, gender, racialization, visual studies and performance. Her research and teaching focus on performance, aesthetics, politics and subjectivity as well as feminist theory, queer studies and contemporary cultural studies. Her re-publication of James Baldwin’s illustrated book, Little Man, Little Man, will be published by Duke this year. She is researching food and performance and a new book about the intersections of sculpture and performance.

Allison Carruth
Associate Professor, Department of English, UCLA

Carruth is a co-founder of the collaborative public art and community engagement project called Play the LA River. The author of Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food (Cambridge UP 2013), she is currently researching the interplay of regional American food cultures and transnational environmental movements since the 1980s as well as the environmental discourses versus material impacts of the Internet. Connecting these areas of interest is her current book project, “Network Ecologies: A Cultural and Environmental History of the Digital Age.”

Marcia Chatelain
Associate Professor, Department of History, Georgetown University

Author of South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration (Duke University Press, 2015), which recasts Chicago’s great migration through the lens of black girls between the years of 1910 and 1940. She is a historian of African American life and culture in the 20th century. She is currently working on a book which examines the relationship between communities of color and fast food, tentatively titled “Burgers in the Age of Black Capitalism: Race, Fast Food and Civil Rights in America.”

J. Michelle Coghlan
Lecturer, English and American Studies Department, University of Manchester

Author of “Aftertastes of Ruin: Uncanny Sites of Memory in Henry James’s Paris” in Transforming Henry James (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013) and “Absolutely Punk: Queer Economies of Desire in Tarzan and the Apes” in Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers (Continuum, 2012). Her forthcoming book, “Sensational Internationalism,” recovers the Paris Commune’s spectacular afterlife in late 19th and early 20th-century U.S. literary, visual, and performance culture (Edinburgh University Press). She specializes in 19th and 20th-century American literature and culture. Her new project, “Culinary Designs,” chronicles the rise of American food writing and the making of American taste in the long 19th century. Her book Sensational Internationalism, will be published in September 2016.

David Edwards
Professor, School of Engineering and the Applied Sciences, Harvard University

Author of Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation (Harvard UP, 2008) and The Lab: Creativity and Culture (Harvard University Press, 2011), both of which are based in his passion for “artscience” and founding of Le Laboratoire, an innovation space in Paris that encourages collaboration between artists and scientists for innovation. His work includes new approaches to treating infectious diseases, new ways of eating, and new ways of cleaning the air with plants. He was made the youngest member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001, and, later a member of the French National Academy of Engineering (2008), he has written widely on creativity in the arts and sciences.

Rachel Field
Co-founder of Vapor Communications

Vapor Communications has developed a platform for digitally engaging with scent in a manner similar to the way in which we currently employ light and sound. Field is a mechanical engineer focusing on technology for improving sensory engagement and emotional connectivity. A collaboration begun at Harvard University with Professor David Edwards, Vapor Communications’ oPlatform (olfactory platform) empowers users to tell stories and communicate with others via scent, a heretofore underutilized sense in today’s digital world. In addition to consumer applications, the platform is the cornerstone of an upcoming clinical trial examining decreased olfactory skills as an early indicator for certain metabolic and neurological diseases. Also the founder of ReWire, an initiative for reclaiming electronic waste in developing regions, with a pilot program in Accra, Ghana.

Elizabeth Hoover
Assistant Professor, American Studies, Brown University

Elizabeth Hoover works on environmental justice in American Indian communities, indigenous food movements, and community engaged research. Her current book project, tentatively titled “‘The River is in Us’: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community,” examines how industrial sites along the St. Lawrence River, and subsequent health studies around these sites, have affected people’s perceptions of their bodies and the environment. Her second book project is tentatively titled “From ‘Garden Warriors’ to ‘Good Seeds’: Indigenizing the Local Food Movement.” Through a study of 36 different American Indian garden projects across the United States, this project examines the Native American gardening movement as a food sovereignty/ health promotion/ cultural preservation movement distinct from, but connected to, the broader local food movement.

Neetu Khanna
Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature, University of Southern California

Khanna’s areas of interest include postcolonial literatures, global Marxisms, literatures and theories of decolonization, feminist and queer theory, and Marxist aesthetics in India. She is currently completing her book manuscript, “Progressive Feeling: The Visceral Logics of Decolonization.”

Heather Lee
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT

Lee received her Ph.D. from Brown University in American studies in May 2014 and is currently a Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT. She is writing a book on the history of full-service restaurants in New York City, chronicling the transformation of 19th-century immigrant eateries into a $9 billion industry by World War II. Alongside this research, Lee is developing a historical database of immigrant restaurants, which she will make publicly available through an interactive digital platform. Her research has been featured in The Atlantic magazine and Gastropod, a podcast on food science and history. She has advised and curated exhibitions, including shows at the New-York Historical Society, the Museum of American History, and the Museum of Chinese in America. She will be joining the faculty staff of NYU in Shanghai in the fall 2016 semester as assistant professor of history.

Parama Roy
Professor, Department of English, University of California, Davis

Author of Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (University of California Press; Vistaar Press, 1998), Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial (Duke University Press, 2010), and States of Trauma: Gender and Violence in South Asia (Zubaan, 2009). She specializes in postcolonial theory and literatures; Victorian studies; appetite, consumption, taste/food studies; and animal studies.

Arun Saldanha
Associate Professor, Department of Geography, Environment, and Society, University of Minnesota

Saldanha is a cultural geographer specializing in race, music and travel, and author of Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), an ethnography of race as a material process, or of how different bodies interact with each other and become divided into racial groups. He also coedited Geographies of Race and Food: Fields Bodies Markets (with Rachel Slocum; Ashgate. 2013), Deleuze and Race (with Jason Michael Adams, Edinburgh University Press, 2013), and Sexual Difference Between Psychoanalysis and Vitalism (Routledge, 2013). He is currently finishing Space After Deleuze (Bloomsbury, forthcoming), and will soon start writing a theoretical volume on the materiality of race. Other interests include the anthropocene, Marxism and the history of early Dutch colonialism.

Sarah D. Wald
Assistant Professor, Department of English and Program in Environmental Studies, University of Oregon

Wald specializes in the relationship among race, labor, nature, and nation in 20th-century U.S. culture and literature. Her first book, The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl, is being released this April by University of Washington Press. It examines representations of Californian farmers and farmworkers to analyze the role nature and land plays in the racialized construction of legal and cultural citizenship.

Ashley Rose Young
Doctoral Candidate, Department of History, Duke University

Young studies the ways in which culinary literature yields significant historical themes in its prose and imagery such as: women’s labor in the public sphere, racial tensions in the Jim Crow south, and New Orleans’ transatlantic cultural exchange with Europe, West Africa, and the Caribbean. She is currently working on her dissertation, “Nourishing Networks: Provisioning Southern Cities in the Atlantic World, 1700-1950,” which explores cultural networks in America through the historic production, distribution, and consumption of food in port cities like New Orleans, Charleston, and Baltimore. Young is a research fellow and guest curator at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans where she curated the Lena Richard: Pioneer in Food TV Exhibit and Oral History Project and the Terroir Tapestries: Interactive Consumption Histories Exhibition. She was an oral historian for the Southern Foodways Alliance and curated the Carrboro Farmers’ Market Oral History Project. Young was also co-director of the Subnature and Culinary Culture Program at Duke University, which sought to critically analyze street food culture and non-traditional modes of cooking in global cuisines.

Respondents

Amy Bentley
Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health, New York University

A historian with interests in the social, historical, and cultural contexts of food, Bentley is the author of Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet (University of California Press, 2014), which was a finalist for a James Beard Award, and also winner of the ASFS Best Book Award. Other publications include Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics Of Domesticity (University of Illinois, 1998); A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Era (editor; Berg, 2011); and articles on such diverse topics as the politics of southwestern cuisine, a historiography of food riots, and the cultural implications of the Atkins diet. Bentley is co-founder of the Experimental Cuisine Collective, an interdisciplinary group of scientists, food studies scholars and chefs who study the intersection of science and food, co-founder of the NYU Urban Farm Lab, and serves as a Faculty Fellow in Residence at Brittany Hall at NYU. She is editor of Food, Culture, and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and is a board member for the journals Food and Foodways and the Graduate Journal of Food Studies.

Miguel Angel Centeno
Musgrave Professor of Sociology and International Affairs, Chair of the Department of Sociology, Princeton University

Centeno has published many articles, chapters and books. His latest publication is State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain (California University Press, 2013). Forthcoming are War and Society (Polity. 2016) and State Making in the Developing World (California University Press, 2016). A report from his most recent project on global risk was published in the Annual Review of Sociology (2015). Through the Mapping Globalization project he has worked on improving the quantitative scholarship available on globalization. He is one of the founders of the Princeton Network on State Building in the Developing World. In 2013 he founded the Research Community on Global Systemic Risk. In 2000, he founded the Princeton University Preparatory Program, which provides intensive supplemental training for lower income students in local high schools. From 2003 to 2007, he served as the founding Director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. From 1997-2004 he also served as Head of Wilson College at Princeton. Centeno has been a Fulbright scholar in Russia and Mexico. In 1997 he was awarded the Presidential Teaching Prize at Princeton University.

Zahid R. Chaudhary
Associate Professor, Department of English, Princeton University

Chaudhary specializes in postcolonial studies, visual culture, and critical theory. His first book, Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India, provides a historical and philosophical account of early photography in India, analyzing how aesthetic experiments in colonial photographic practice shed light on the changing nature of perception and notions of truth, memory, and embodiment. He has also written about documentary film and affect, as well as abstraction in contemporary photography. His current book project, “Mimetic Acts: Cold War Aesthetics in Pakistan,” analyzes art, film, and literature in Pakistan in the period between decolonization and globalization.

Fabio Parasecoli
Associate Professor and Director of Food Studies Initiatives, The New School

Parasecoli’s work explores the intersection of food, media, and politics. His most recent research focuses on food design. He studied East Asian cultures and political science in Rome, Naples and Beijing, where he specialized in contemporary Chinese history. After covering Middle and Far Eastern political issues, he worked for many years as the U.S. correspondent for Gambero Rosso, Italy’s authoritative food and wine magazine. He regularly lectures for the food and wine MBA of the University of Bologna (Italy) and the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo (Italy). He blogs for The Huffington Post. Among his recent publications: Bite Me! Food in Popular Culture (2008), and Al Dente: A History of Food in Italy (2014, translated into Italian in 2015). He was general editor with Peter Scholliers of the six-volume Cultural History of Food (2012). His new books, Feast Your Eyes: Food, Film, and Cultural Citizenship in the U.S. and Unequal Territories: Food, Place and Power in the Global Market, are slated for 2016.

Guest

Smitha Haneef
Executive Director, Princeton University Campus Dining

Haneef oversees campus residential dining, retail venues, athletics food operations, catering and vending. She works at the nexus of academics and administration with faculty in humanities and sciences in the areas of food and food services. Prior to joining Princeton, she helped launch the LifeWorks Restaurant Group, a premium on-site restaurant division of the food service company Aramark. Before Aramark, she was chef and owner of Aha Bite Corporation, an award-wining restaurant and catering company outside Birmingham, Alabama.

Panel 1: Edible Technologies

Panel 2: Racial (In)Digestion