Course Spotlights: Food & Art, Gender & Food
Read on for a sneak peek into some of the Gastronomy classes we will be offering this Spring. Registration information can be found here.
Food and Art
Laura Ziman will teach Food and Art during the Spring 2018 semester and has prepared this Course Spotlight.
Looking at the earliest images, tableware and sculpture of food from the Ancient World to the contemporary, we will see the historic changes in objects and artwork that refer to cuisine. Discoveries will be made in the purposes and meaning of imagery and three-dimensional objects through time from a variety of cultures.
Artists’ lives will be explored through their work, the time they worked in and their country of origin leading to greater understanding of the art they created.
Posters, cookbooks, advertisements, films and models of food all contribute to the visual cornucopia we will explore.
This course includes trips to The Museum of Fine Arts, which contains food art from Mesopotamia to the 21st century. Ancient Greek oil pitchers, an American dining table from 19th Century Dorchester to 20th Century table settings will be visited.
We will visit a food market and view the artistry in food arrangement and packaging. Food artists will be visiting the class to share the inspiration and discussion of techniques used in making their art.
Gender and Food
Dr. Megan J. Elias will teach Gender and Food during the Spring 2018 semester and has prepared this Course Spotlight.
Can a woman eat a Manwich? Can Dad produce Mom’s home cooking? And how is the movement away from gender binaries reflected in foodways? In Food and Gender we will explore ways in which language and behaviors around food both reinforce and challenge gender hierarchies and restrictive norms. Using frameworks developed in gender studies we will interrogate our contemporary foodscape through close readings of many media, including food blogs, magazines, TV shows and advertisements. We will also include our own cooking histories and habits in our research and discussion, taking note of when and how cultural assumptions about gender restrict our choices in the kitchen.
The course will include reading, research, field work, discussion, and cooking to help us understand why and how food has been gendered and how the process differs across place, time, and culture.
Students will be responsible for developing a group project together as well as working on individual investigations of gender and food.