Alison Hope Alkon

Assistant Professor, Sociology, University of the Pacific
ahalkon@gmail.com

Alkon’s research sits at the intersection of food politics, racial identity formation and environmental and social justice. Her dissertation, entitled Black, White and Green: A Study of Urban Farmers Markets compares how sustainability-the intersection of environmental protection, social justice and economic growth–is imagined and practiced by participants farmers markets serving racially and economically distinct areas. She has published work on this topic in Gastronomica, Agriculture and Human Values, Local Environment, and Sociological Inquiry. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Davis, where she benefited greatly from the Food and the Body MRG and the Environmental Justice Project.

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, “Hidden Hunger: Food, Health and Citizenship from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Obesity Epidemic,” is a cultural history of the relationship between dietary ideals and social ideals. She has an article forthcoming in American Studies, “The Terror Within: Obesity in Post 9/11 U.S. Life.” 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

Associate 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. She is currently writing a book on gardening and summer cottages in Russia and editing a volume on food in postsocialist Eurasia. In her other publications she has addressed such topics as food nationalism, McDonaldization, culinary tourism, and the social experience of hunger.

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) and In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (University of California Press, November 2009). Professor Carney 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.

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 has explored the effects of agri-food regulations - especially US and EU pesticide residue laws and enforcement - on fresh vegetable production in Costa Rica. Using a political ecology approach that combines qualitative and quantitative methods, his work compares production for export and the national market as it is shaped by geographically uneven enforcement and regulation, access to resources, and environmental factors. In addition to the “political ecology of pesticides,” his more general interests involve local knowledge, governance, the first/third world binary, agrarian political economy, and comparative assessments of alternative and conventional agriculture. He is currently working on a project involving social and environmental analysis of production and consumption in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). He has published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and Geoforum with forthcoming work in Human Ecology and Global Environmental Change. A recent paper exploring production-consumption linkages vis-à-vis pesticide residues on food won the Eric Wolf Prize and will appear in the Journal of Political Ecology. He holds a PhD in geography from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Julie Guthman

Associate Professor, Community Studies, UC Santa Cruz

Julie Guthman teaches courses primarily in global political economy and the politics of food and agriculture. She has published extensively on contemporary activist 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 “alternative food” more generally.  She is currently working on a book that explores how the alternative food movement’s treatment of the “problem” of obesity exposes the limitations of alternative food in effecting widespread food system transformation.  A commentary on this topic, “How Michael Pollan et al. Made Me Want to Eat Cheetos” can be found in the Summer 2007 issue of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. Her previous book, Agrarian Dreams: the Paradox of Organic Farming in California (University of California, 2004), won the 2007 Frederick H. Buttel Award for Outstanding Scholarly Achievement from the Rural Sociological Society and the 2009 Donald Q. Innis Award from the rural geography specialty group of the Association of American Geographers. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of California at Berkeley.

Wendy Ho

Associate Professor, Women and Gender Studies and Asian American Studies, UC Davis
waho@ucdavis.edu

Ho’s recent work examines the narratives of food, culture, history, geography and environmental social justice among Asian American writers such as David Mas Masumoto, Karen Tei Yamashita, Shani Mootoo, Garrett Hongo and Ruth Ozeki. She is also doing research on Chinese American cookbook-autobiographies. Her research and teaching areas include gender; feminist theory; Asian American literature and women; literature by women of color; masculinities and cultural studies. Professor Ho’s most recent book publication is In My Mother’s House: The Politics of Mother-Daughter in Asian American Literature (Critical Perspectives on Asian Pacific Americans Series, vol 6 AltaMira Press/Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).

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.’

Kimberly D. Nettles

Assistant 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).

Alia C. Pan

Scholar in Residence, English, UC Berkeley.
acyap@berkeley.edu
Pan is interested in the material and psychic reach of the plantation in the lives of its laborers and their descendants. Her dissertation, “Remembering Bodies,” examines novels by William Faulkner, Paule Marshall, Gayl Jones, Edwidge Danticat, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka to show how the plantation brought territories and people under profitable control and drove the economies of the Caribbean, Brazil, the American South, and Hawaii. Read collectively, these texts demonstrate how the internalization of the plantation’s political economy, which conceals the relationship between the laborer and production, manifests itself in the trans-generational trauma, obsessive preservation of memory, and sexual abuse that characterize the neo-plantation novel.

Carolyn de la Peña

Associate 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.

Kyla Tompkins

Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and English, Pomona College
kyla.tompkins@pomona.edu

Kyla Tompkins is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and English at Pomona College. She received her BA from York University, her MA from University of Toronto and her PhD from Stanford University. She has published in Gastronomica, Callaloo, the Journal of Food, Culture and Society, and is presently finishing her manuscript entitled Racial Indigestion: Eating and Embodiment in the Nineteenth Century. She is a former journalist and food writer who has published in the Globe and Mail, the San Francisco Chronicle and 7×7 magazine.

Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft

Lecturer, History, UC Berkeley
bwurgaft@berkeley.edu

While his academic research focuses on European intellectual history and modern Jewish history in Germany and France, he also works as a food writer for publications such as Gastronomica, Meatpaper and others. In his essays Wurgaft blends historical, journalistic and literary genres in order to produce new perspectives on food and drink; his topics are far-ranging, and have included anti-Starbucks protests, food smells and their use in racial stereotyping, and vegetarianism as practiced during the Third Reich. Wurgaft holds a BA in Religious Studies from Swarthmore College and an MA and PhD in History from Berkeley. During 2009-10 he will teach courses in European intellectual history and Jewish history as a lecturer at Berkeley.

Michael Ziser

Assistant Professor, English, UC Davis
mgziser@ucdavis.edu

Ziser completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University and joined the UCD English Department in 2003. His scholarly fields include American literature before the Civil War; American natural history and agricultural writing through the present day; and ecocritical theory. Professor Ziser’s most current research considers the envirocultural preconditions and consequences of agricultural production in the pre-industrial American colonies. Recent publications include extended profiles of early American naturalists Thomas Nuttall, Constantine Rafinesque, and Alexander Wilson (2005); a reconsideration of Walden’s mode (Nineteenth Century Prose, Fall 2004); an inquiry into very early American writing about tobacco (William and Mary Quarterly, Winter 2005); an article on Lacan, Poe, Audubon, and Zoosemiotics (Angelaki, Winter 2008); and a chapter on the literary dimensions of early New England apple culture (Early Modern Ecostudies, 2008).