Fall 2022 Pépin Lecture Series in Food Studies & Gastronomy
Fall 2022 lectures will be presented both in-person and via webinar format. Registration is free and open to the public – please follow the link for each program to register.
SEPTEMBER
Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation
with Emily Contois, KC Hysmith, and Zenia Kish
Zoom Webinar: participants will be sent link one day prior to the lecture.
Image by image and hashtag by hashtag, Instagram has redefined the ways we relate to food. Emily J. H. Contois and Zenia Kish edit contributions that explore the massively popular social media platform as a space for self-identification, influence, transformation, and resistance. Artists and journalists join a wide range of scholars to look at food’s connection to Instagram from vantage points as diverse as Hong Kong’s camera-centric foodie culture, the platform’s long history with feminist eateries, and the photography of Australia’s livestock producers. What emerges is a portrait of an arena where people do more than build identities and influence. Users negotiate cultural, social, and economic practices in a place that, for all its democratic potential, reinforces entrenched dynamics of power.
Interdisciplinary in approach and transnational in scope, Food Instagram offers general readers and experts alike new perspectives on an important social media space and its impact on a fundamental area of our lives.
Emily J.H. Contois is Assistant Professor of Media Studies, University of Tulsa
KC Hysmith is a PhD Candidate in American Studies at the University of North Carolina
Zenia Kish is Assistant Professor Media Studies, University of Tulsa
*Save 30% on Food Instagram by ordering from University of Illinois Press with code S22UIP
Fri, September 23, 2022
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT
OCTOBER
Getting Something to Eat in Jackson
with Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr.
In person plus Zoom webinar: webinar participants will be sent link one day prior to the lecture.
Getting Something to Eat in Jackson uses food—what people eat and how—to explore the interaction of race and class in the lives of African Americans in the contemporary urban South. Joseph Ewoodzie Jr. examines how “foodways”—food availability, choice, and consumption—vary greatly between classes of African Americans in Jackson, Mississippi, and how this reflects and shapes their very different experiences of a shared racial identity.
Ewoodzie spent more than a year following a group of socioeconomically diverse African Americans—from upper-middle-class patrons of the city’s fine-dining restaurants to men experiencing homelessness who must organize their days around the schedules of soup kitchens. Ewoodzie goes food shopping, cooks, and eats with a young mother living in poverty and a grandmother working two jobs. He works in a Black-owned BBQ restaurant, and he meets a man who decides to become a vegan for health reasons but who must drive across town to get tofu and quinoa. Ewoodzie also learns about how soul food is changing and why it is no longer a staple survival food. Throughout, he shows how food choices influence, and are influenced by, the racial and class identities of Black Jacksonians.
By tracing these contemporary African American foodways, Getting Something to Eat in Jackson offers new insights into the lives of Black Southerners and helps challenge the persistent homogenization of blackness in American life.
Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr. is associate professor of sociology at Davidson College. He is the author of Break Beats in the Bronx: Rediscovering Hip-Hop’s Early Years. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. Twitter @piko_e
Thu, October 13, 2022
6:00 PM – 7:00 PM EDT
Location:
Boston University College of Arts and Science, Room 211
685 – 725 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02215
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Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work
with Diana Garvin
In person plus Zoom webinar: webinar participants will be sent link one day prior to the lecture.
Feeding Fascism explores how women negotiated the politics of Italy’s Fascist regime in their daily lives and how they fed their families through agricultural and industrial labor. The book looks at women’s experiences of Fascism by examining the material world in which they lived in relation to their thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Over the past decade, Diana Garvin has conducted extensive research in Italian museums, libraries, and archives. Feeding Fascism includes illustrations of rare cookbooks, kitchen utensils, cafeteria plans, and culinary propaganda to connect women’s political beliefs with the places that they lived and worked and the objects that they owned and borrowed. Garvin draws on first-hand accounts, such as diaries, work songs, and drawings, that demonstrate how women and the Fascist state vied for control over national diet across many manifestations – cooking, feeding, and eating – to assert and negotiate their authority. Revealing the national stakes of daily choices, and the fine line between resistance and consent, Feeding Fascism attests to the power of food.
Diana Garvin is Assistant Professor of Italian with a focus on Mediterranean Studies at the University of Oregon.
Wed, October 26, 2022
6:00 PM – 7:00 PM EDT
Location:
Groce Pépin Culinary Innovation Laboratory
808 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 124
Boston, MA 02215
NOVEMBER
Food in Memory and Imagination: Space, Place, and Taste
with Beth Forrest and Greg de St. Maurice
In person plus Zoom webinar: webinar participants will be sent link one day prior to the lecture.
Editors Beth M. Forrest, Professor of Liberal Arts at the Culinary Institute of America, and Greg de St. Maurice, Assistant Professor at Keio University, Japan will discuss the recently published volume Food in Memory and Imagination: Space, Place and, Taste.
How do we engage with food through memory and imagination? This expansive volume spans time and space to illustrate how, through food, people have engaged with the past, the future, and their alternative presents.
Beth M. Forrest and Greg de St. Maurice have brought together first-class contributions, from both established and up-and-coming scholars, to consider how imagination and memory intertwine and sometimes diverge. Chapters draw on cases around the world-including Iran, Italy, Japan, Kenya, and the US-and include topics such as national identity, food insecurity, and the phenomenon of knowledge. Contributions represent a range of disciplines, including anthropology, history, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. This volume is a veritable feast for the contemporary food studies scholar.
Fri, November 18, 2022
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST
Location:
Groce Pépin Culinary Innovation Laboratory
Boston University Gastronomy Program
808 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 124
Boston, MA 02215
We thank the Jacques Pépin Foundation for sponsorship of this lecture series.