Tending the Field: Critical Food Studies Authors Demystify Publishing Process

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Professional Development Format

Abstract

What makes a critical food studies book work? This professional development session showcases the varied approaches American Studies scholars take to their work to deepen and challenge understandings of food, culture, and society to print. Panelists at various career stages will reflect on the opportunities and challenges they have encountered in their work, sharing practical publishing advice and strategies for navigating interdisciplinary scholarship. Panelists will begin by introducing their new and forthcoming books, offering a brief overview of the questions, arguments, and processes that shape their book’s development and publication. A lightning round of short readings will provide a taste of these books. The session then moves into open discussion, offering insight into the perspectives and processes that uniquely animate interdisciplinary book projects in Critical Food Studies and American Studies. This session is designed to serve as a resource for early-career scholars, foster interdisciplinary dialogue, and celebrate the dynamic intellectual and creative work being done at the intersection of Critical Food Studies and American Studies.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chairs

• Kelly Alexander, University of North Carolina at Chapel H

• Hanna Garth, Princeton University

Panelists

• Megan J. Elias, Boston University

• Sarah Fouts, University of Maryland-Baltimore County

• Alice P Julier, Chatham University

• Ashanté M Reese, The University of Texas at Austin

• Kyla Wazana Tompkins, University at Buffalo

Biographical Information

Keywords would be: Food Studies, Methodologies, Ethnography (it’s a drop-down and you have to choose 3, and pedagogy or teaching is not one of them)

Tending the Field: New and Upcoming Books at the Intersection of Critical Food Studies and American Studies

This professional development session showcases the varied approaches American Studies scholars take to deepen and challenge understandings of food, culture, and society. Panelists will begin by introducing their new and forthcoming books, offering a brief overview of the questions, arguments, and methodologies that shape their work. A lightning round of short readings will provide a taste of these books. The session then moves into open discussion, offering insight into the ideas, actors, and perspectives that animate the intersection of Critical Food Studies and American Studies. Panelists will reflect on the opportunities and challenges they have encountered in their work, sharing practical publishing advice and strategies for navigating interdisciplinary scholarship. This session is designed to foster interdisciplinary dialogue, serve as a resource for early-career scholars, and celebrate the dynamic intellectual and creative work being done at the intersection of Critical Food Studies and American Studies.

Kelly Alexander is an assistant professor and the George B. Tindall Fellow of American Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she teaches courses on food politics and ethics and is the co-director of the Food Studies Minor. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University and an undergraduate degree in journalism from Northwestern University. She is also a James Beard Award Journalism Award winner and a former editor at Saveur and Food & Wine magazines. Alexander’s food writing and cultural analysis has appeared in scholarly publications including Gastronomica and Food & Foodways, as well as in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, and many other consumer publications. She is co-author of the New York Times best-selling barbecue cookbook Smokin’ with Myron Mixon and author of a UNC Press “Savor the South” series cookbook on peaches.


Megan Elias: Megan Elias is a historian and the associate professor of the practice and director of the Gastronomy Program at Boston University. Her research explores the history of food and culture through prisms of food writing, markets, and home economics. She is the author of Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture (2017) as well as four other books about food history, including Food in the United States, 1890–1945, which was selected by the American Library Association as an Outstanding Academic Text for 2009, and Lunch: the History of a Meal (2014. She is also the author of numerous articles and book chapters about food history, and served as editor-in-chief for Food, Culture & Society. Her current project was inspired while doing research for her lunch book, which introduced her to a series of tiny guide books about running various kinds of business in the 1920s. Several were about hotel work, and which led her to consider the life of Conrad Hilton in connection with the question of how hospitality became an industry.



Sarah Fouts: Sarah Fouts is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies, director of the Public Humanities program, and affiliate professor in the Language, Literacy, and Culture doctoral program. Fouts’s research interests include food studies, labor studies, New Orleans, Honduras, political economy, ethnography, disasters, and community engagement. Fouts’s book, Rebuilding New Orleans: Immigrant Laborers and Street Food Vendors in the Post-Katrina Era (UNC Press 2025), analyzes the stories of Central American and Mexican immigration in post-Katrina New Orleans. Fouts shows how despite being criminalized and pitted against other low wage workers, immigrants use multiracial solidarities and grassroots resistance to shape politics and culture in New Orleans. Fouts produced and edited the series “Latinx Foodways in North America” for the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition. Fouts is also an op-ed contributor for the New York Times and contributes articles to NACLA and Gravy magazine.

Hanna Garth: Hanna Garth is an assistant professor of anthropology at Princeton University and a sociocultural and medical anthropologist focused on the anthropology of food. Garth’s scholarship is broadly focused on the ways in which marginalized communities struggle to overcome structural inequalities and prejudice as they attempt to access basic needs. Garth studies these questions in Latin America and the Caribbean, and among Black and Latinx communities in the United States. She has focused on the ways in which the global industrial food system affects food access inequalities. Her first book "Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal (Stanford University Press, 2020), is based on ethnographic research in Santiago de Cuba, the island's second largest city. Her research reveals the ways that even food distribution systems, which ostensibly supply sufficient nutritional needs, can also have detrimental effects on individual and community wellbeing. Her next book project draws on ethnographic research she has conducted on the Los Angeles Food Justice Movement from 2008-2021. This project analyzes the work of organizations that are trying to improve access to healthy food in South Los Angeles. Based on this work she co-edited the volume Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). She is also conducting new research in South Los Angeles on emergency food programming during and after COVID-19, and developing future work on fish and seafood in the Caribbean.


Alice Julier: Alice Julier is a Professor at Chatham University, where she is also the Food Studies Director of the Center for Regional Agriculture Food and Transformation (CRAFT). As a sociologist, she writes about inequality, food, and everyday life. The past president of the Association for the Study of Food and Society, her research focuses on materiality, social movements, domesticity, labor, consumption, and inequality in food systems. She has written on topics ranging from masculinities and food (“Mapping Men onto the Menu,”), poverty and obesity ( “The Political Economy of Obesity,”) history ( “Julia at Smith”) and food systems (“Hiding Race and Class in the Discourse of Commercial Food.”) Her first book, Eating Together: Food, Friendship, and Inequality, focuses on commensality, gender, and race. She is the co-editor of the fourth edition of Food and Culture: A Reader, the most widely used food studies textbook. Prior research includes feminist women's health organizations, gender, race, and leadership in the US Civil Rights Movement, and critical social theory. These interests center on how people navigate practice and politics, activism and everyday life. At CRAFT, her focus is on research and outreach that creates the conditions for a new food economy and cultural equity.

Ashanté Reese is an associate professor of African and African Disaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She works at the intersection of critical food studies and Black geographies, examining the ways Black people produce and navigate food-related spaces. Animated by the question, who and what survives?, Dr. Reese’s work has focused on the everyday strategies Black people employ while navigating inequity. Her first book, Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C., takes up these themes through an ethnographic exploration of antiblackness and food access. Black Food Geographies won the 2020 Best Monograph Award from the Association for the Study of Food and Society and 2020 Margaret Mead Award jointly awarded by the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology. Her second book, Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice, is a collection co-edited with Hanna Garth that explores the geographic, social, and cultural dimensions of food in Black life across the U.S. Currently, Dr. Reese is working on a cultural history of sugar and Sugar Land, Texas in which she explores the spatial, economic, and carceral implications of sugar and the sometimes contradictory and deadly sweetness that marks Black life. A committed teacher, Dr. Reese was the recipient of the 2020-21 Friar Centennial Teaching Fellowship.


Kyla Wazana Tompkins: Kyla Wazana Tompkins is Professor and Chair of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo, and Professor of English at Pomona College. Here first book, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century, received the 2012 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize and the Best Book in Food Studies Award. She is the author of the James Beard Award-winning essay “On Boba,” and the author of Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century and the forthcoming Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot, as well as co-editor of Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (A Choice Outstanding Academic Title). Her essay for Avidly —“We’re Not Here to Learn What We Already Know” — has been downloaded over 700,000 times and is widely assigned in gender studies and the critical humanities as a guide to asking questions well.