Charlotte Biltekoff

Assistant Professor, Food Science and Technology and American Studies, UC Davis
cbiltekoff@ucdavis.edu

Biltekoff’s primary research interest is in the culture of food and health in the United States. Her book project, “Eating Right in America: Food, Health and Citizenship from From Domestic Science to Obesity,” is a cultural history of the relationship between dietary ideals and social ideals. She has an article in American Studies, “The Terror Within: Obesity in Post 9/11 U.S. Life” (Fall 2007). Professor Biltekoff teaches interdisciplinary courses that explore the culture of food and eating in the United States. She completed her Ph.D. in American Civilization at Brown University in 2006.

Melissa L. Caldwell

Professor, Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz
lissa@ucsc.edu

Caldwell is a fieldworking anthropologist who has been conducting ethnographic research in Russia since 1995. Her research focuses on changing food practices and food insecurity in Russia and in postsocialist Europe more generally. She is the author of Not by Bread Alone: Social Support in the New Russia (University of California Press, 2004), an ethnographic study of a transnational food relief program in post-Soviet Moscow, and Dacha Idylls: Living Organically in Russia’s Countryside (University of California Press, 2011), an ethnographic study of summer gardens, natural foods, and Russia’s organic lifestyle. She is also the editor of Food and Everyday Life in the Postsocialist World (Indiana University Press, 2009). In her other publications she has addressed such topics as Asian food cultures in Russia, food nationalism, McDonaldization, culinary tourism, and the social experience of hunger. In 2011, she received a National Science Foundation grant to support a co-organized conference on Ethical Foods in Postsocialist Societies at SOAS in London. She is currently co-editing a volume from that conference.

Judith Carney

Professor of Geography at UCLA
carney@geog.ucla.edu

Judith Carney is Professor of Geography at UCLA. She teaches courses on development and environment, comparative food systems, African ecology and development. She is the author of more than 60 research articles and two books. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Harvard University Press, 2001) received the Melville Herskovits book award of the African Studies Association and the James D. Blaut book award of the Association of American Geographers. In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (University of California Press, 2009) was awarded the 2010 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. In Carney won the 2012 Carl O. Sauer Distinguished Scholarship Award from the Latin America specialty group of the Association of American geographers and the 2012 Robert McC. Netting Award from the cultural and political ecology specialty group of the Association of American Geographers. She is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Carney is currently researching West African mangrove oysters, which are collected and marketed by women.

Susan B. Carter

Professor Emeritus, Economics, UC Riverside; Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley
susan.carter@ucr.edu

Carter is an economic historian whose current research program explores the adoption of Chinese food in America beginning in the early twentieth century.   According to culinary scholars, American food retained a strongly British character through most of its history.  Despite waves of immigrants from abroad, ethnic food did not begin to make its way outside of ethnic enclaves until after World War II and did not enter the culinary mainstream until the food revolution of the 1970s.  Using data gleaned from city directories, census records, newspapers, and related sources, Carter demonstrated that Chinese food was the exception.  Beginning about 1900, Chinese restaurants began locating outside of Chinatowns and the cuisine entered the cultural mainstream.  Her first article in the field of food studies is “America’s First Culinary Revolution, or How a Girl from Gopher Prairie Came to Dine on Eggs Fooyung.”  It will appear in Economic Evolution and Revolutions in Historical Time:  Essays in Honor of Gavin Wright, edited by Paul Rhode, Joshua Rosenbloom, and David Weiman, Stanford:  Stanford University Press, scheduled for publication in February 2011.  She has published also published on a variety of topics in labor history, women’s history, immigration, and education and was one of two general editors of the five-volume Historical Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Glenda Drew

Assistant Professor of Visual Communication, Design, UC Davis
gadrew@ucdavis.edu

Drew has exhibited screen-based, interactive designs that integrate text, image and sound throughout the United States. She investigates how information can be delivered creatively to stimulate a new way of engaging with ideas. She is interested in connecting and representing cultural and marginalized voices in visually accessible and appealing ways. Her current projects explore the role of immigrant labor in the US food economy and the import/export of labor and goods.

E. Melanie DuPuis

Associate Professor, Sociology, UC Santa Cruz
emdupuis@ucsc.edu

DuPuis interests include political economy, politics and policy, consumption, food, agriculture, environment, technological change, social history, theory, social justice and social change. Her most recent project was a co-edited special issue of the journal/magazine Gastronomica on the politics of food, a project which came out of her work as a convener of a UC Humanities Research Institute Research Group “Eating Cultures: Race and Food.” Her most recent book, Smoke and Mirrors (2005), is an edited volume that brings together an interdisciplinary group of urban environmental historians, economists, political scientists, and sociologists to look specifically at air pollution. Her previous book, Nature’s Perfect Food (2002) used an interdisciplinary approach to understand the creation of milk as a major aspect of the US diet and as a major commodity in the United States. She is currently at work developing some of her more recent work into a book Good Food, Just Food, an examination of food movements and social justice in the United States and Europe. DuPuis has a Ph.D. in Rural Sociology from Cornell University (1991) and subsequently held a post-doc in Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic University in 1992. From 1992-1997, she was an energy and environmental policy analyst at the New York State Department of Economic Development.

Ryan Galt

Assistant Professor, Community Studies and Development & Agricultural Sustainability Institute, UC Davis
regalt@ucdavis.edu

Galt’s work explores agrifood system governance. Using a political ecology approach that combines qualitative and quantitative methods, his work has compared market relations in export, national, and local agrifood systems, and their shaping by geographically uneven processes of regulation and social change, unequal access to resources, and environmental context. In addition to a topical focus on Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and the transnational political ecology of pesticides, his general interests involve local knowledge, agrarian political economy, and comparative assessments of agrifood systems. He is currently working on a social and environmental analysis of production and consumption in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). He has published in Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Global Environmental Change, Antipode, and California Agriculture. One of his papers exploring production-consumption linkages vis-à-vis pesticide residues on food won the Eric Wolf Prize and appears in the Journal of Political Ecology. His teaching focuses on food systems, rural geography, and political ecology, and he recently received the Outstanding Mentor Award from the UC Davis Consortium for Women and Research. He holds a PhD in geography from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Julie Guthman

Associate Professor, Community Studies at UC Santa Cruz
jguthman@ucsc.edu

Julie Guthman is an Associate Professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz where she teaches courses primarily in global political economy and the politics of food and agriculture. Since receiving her PhD in 2000 in Geography from the University of California at Berkeley, she has published extensively on contemporary efforts to transform the way food is produced, distributed, and consumed, with a particular focus on voluntary food labels, community food security, farm-to-school programs, and the race and class politics of “alternative food.” Her first book, Agrarian Dreams: the Paradox of Organic Farming in California, (University of California, 2004), won the Frederick H. Buttel Award for Outstanding Scholarly Achievement from the Rural Sociological Society and the Donald Q. Innis Award from the Rural Geography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers. Her new book, Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (University of California, 2011) challenges many of the taken-for-granted assumptions about the so-called obesity epidemic, including that it can be addressed by exposing people to the “right” food. It was recently awarded the James M. Blaut Innovative Publication Award from the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers.

Jeff Haydu

Professor, Sociology, UC San Diego
jhaydu@ucsd.edu

Haydu is a recent convert to food studies, having spent 30 years doing comparative-historical work on labor and class relations. His current research examines reform movements by food consumers — from Grahamites (1830s) and pure food advocates (1900s) to contemporary locavores, Fair Traders, and anti-GMO activists — and how these campaigns resemble and differ from the kinds of movements typically studied by social movement scholars. To the extent that food movements rely on the consumption choices of individuals, many of the typical claims made by students of social protest (about how movements organize, recruit new members, engage in strategic framing, etc.) may not fit very well. Haydu has explored some of the similarities and differences in a 2010 article in Mobilization (“Casing Political Consumerism”). He is particularly curious about the ways that food movements piggyback on the cultural scripts of other movements and institutions, in ways that both shape their character and “solve” some of the dilemmas of collective action that might otherwise be handled by the formal organizations, collective identities, and/or political opportunities emphasized by social movement scholars. A first effort to look more closely at this piggybacking (“Cultural Modeling in Two Eras of  U.S. Food Protest”) appears in the August, 2011 issue of Social Problems; a second (“Frame Brokerage in the Pure Food Movement, 1879-1906″) is published in Social Movement Studies (January 2012).

Lynette Hunter

Professor, History of Rhetoric and Performance, Theatre and Dance, UC Davis
lhunter@ucdavis.edu

Hunter has worked as a food historian, curator and cultural researcher for many years. She is Professor of the History of Rhetoric and Performance at UC Davis; previous positions include Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Leeds (UK), and Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London. As someone interested in rhetoric, she has been able to explore books, food, writing and performance in an unusually interdisciplinary manner. She edited the volumes in the series ‘Household and Cookery Books in Britain 1800-1914’ (Prospect Books, 1984, 1987), and contributed the sections on cookery, food and household books, to Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (third edition), vols 1500-1695, 1800-1914. She has many publications (1978-the present) on food pathways, economics, popular culture, storage, preparation, serving of food and cultural implications, and has curated exhibitions on food culture (e.g. Victoria and Albert Museum, London) and reconstructions for consumption (e.g. Surgeon’s Hall, Edinburgh and Gresham College, London). As a performance artist, she also created four performance art installations on food and theory/culture touring Europe/North America (1995-2005). In recent work she has edited ‘Food, Culture, and Community’ (Leeds, 2006) with an article ‘Sharing, Preparing and Eating in Panniqtuuq, Nunavut.’

Lisa Jacobson

Associate Profesor, History, UC Santa Barbara
jacobson@history.ucsb.edu

Jacobson is a cultural historian and author of Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 2004), which explored the emergence of a distinctive children’s consumer culture during the 1920s and 1930s.  Her current book project, “Fashioning New Cultures of Drink: Alcohol’s Quest for Legitimacy after Prohibition,” examines how alcoholic beverage producers, trade associations, tastemakers, and government policies transformed wine, beer, and spirits from commodities of marginal respectability into widely accepted emblems of the good life.  An article from this project, “Beer Goes to War: The Politics of Beer Promotion and Production in World War II,” appeared in the September 2009 issue of Food, Culture, and Society.  She has taught food history courses at UCSB and is a co-convener of the Food Studies Research Focus Group, sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UCSB.

Kimberly D. Nettles

Associate Professor, Women and Gender Studies, UC Davis
kdnettles@ucdavis.edu

Nettles received her Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA, and taught at the University of Memphis before coming to UC Davis in 2001. In earlier research she examined women’s mobilization in response to the food bans during the economic crises of Guyana in the early 1980s. Professor Nettles’ book based on this research, Guyana Diaries: Women’s Lives Across Difference (Left Coast Press, “Writing Lives: Ethnographic Narratives” series), will be published in 2008. She is currently exploring food politics and cultures within African American communities and Black women’s food entrepreneurship. Her recently published essay “‘Saving’ Soul Food” appeared in Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture (Summer 2007).

Carolyn de la Peña

Professor, American Studies and Davis Humanities Institute (Director), UC Davis
ctdelapena@ucdavis.edu

de la Peña has written widely on technology, material culture, consumer culture, and foodways in the United States. Her publications include Re-Wiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies, with Siva Vaidhyanathan (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) and The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (New York University Press, 2003). Professor de la Peña’s current book project, Sweet Nothings: Artificial Sugar and the Manufacture of Modern Taste, is a cultural history of artificial sweetener production, marketing, and consumption in the twentieth century United States. An article from this project, “Sweeten My Life a Little: Food Risk in the Saccharin Rebellion of 1977,” can be found in the Summer 2007 issue of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. She holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.

Erika Rappaport

Associate Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara
rappaport@history.ucsb.edu

Erika Rappaport (Ph.D. in Modern British history from Rutgers University in 1993 is an associate professor in the history department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton 2001) and of several essays and articles on consumerism and gender in Britain and its empire. She is currently working on a book on tea, globalization and consumer culture that is tentatively titled, Tea Parties: Britishness, Imperial Legacies, and Global Consumer Cultures. This book explores how global markets for South Asian teas were created and at times rejected between the late mid 19th and mid 20th centuries. Part of this project has been published as an essay on tea adulteration entitled “Packaging China: Foreign Articles and Dangerous Tastes in the Mid-Victorian Tea Party,” in The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World, edited by Frank Trentmann (Oxford University Press, 2006). As part of a fellowship with the Cultures of Consumption Research Programme housed at Birkbeck College, University of London, Rappaport organized a workshop on European food scares. She is also currently co-director of the Food Studies Research Focus Group at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, UCSB, and is working on an edited volume on the history of British cuisine.