Nicholas Bauch

Ph.D. student, Geography, UCLA
nbbauch@ucla.edu

His research and teaching uses perspectives from environmental history, history of science, feminism, and science & technology studies to examine how food has been constructed as healthy as it flows through different spatial contexts, focusing on the soil and internal bodily organs. This is done to address production/consumption debates in food studies, and ultimately geographical questions about the co-constitution of nature and society. Bauch co-leads the UCLA Food and Agriculture Colloquium, is a recipient of the UCLA Darling Biomedical Archive Research Fellowship, and is an L.A. Urban Ranger. His other academic interests include film as a medium of geographical expression; the political ecology of the Los Angeles River; the geography of poison; Lagos, Nigeria; and the history of supercomputers as climate change modelers. He holds a B.S. and an M.S. in geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Joseph Bohling

Ph.D. student, History, UC Berkeley.
jbohling@berkeley.edu

Joseph Bohling is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of
California, Berkeley and is a student of contemporary French politics and
culture.  His dissertation examines the French state’s war on alcohol
during the so-called “Thirty Glorious Years” of economic expansion between
1945 and 1975.

Michelle N. Branch

Ph.D. candidate, History, UC Berkeley
mbranch@berkeley.edu

Michelle’s dissertation explores the intersections among food, taste, and social interaction in 19th-century northeastern American cities. Specifically, her dissertation seeks to understand how a series of rural to urban environmental transformations influenced nutritional knowledge, eating practices, and cultural norms within and among a diverse group of populations. Michelle holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School and an A.B. in American Studies, also from Stanford.

Troy Crowder

Phd. student, History, University of Santa Cruz
tcrowder@ucsc.edu

Troy is a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he is studying environmental history. Troy has long held an interest in the role of food in history, including the intersection of food and disease, science, social policy, culture, and world history. Troy’s Master’s project from the California State University, Sacramento was a comparative exploration of the policy, politics, and history of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), or “Mad Cow Disease, in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. As a PhD student at Santa Cruz, Troy is pursuing a project on the homogenization of the world tropical regions, including the dual role of tropical fruits as staple foods and intensive monocrop agriculture in homogenization waves. As part of his project, Troy has recently completed a study of the world history of bananas, with a special emphasis on the banana’s ecology, worldwide production and consumption of the banana, and the banana’s historical place in human culture.

Catherine Ming T’ien Duffly

Ph.D. student, Department of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies, UC Berkeley
kate_duffly@berkeley.edu

Duffly’s research focuses on social protest theater, community-based performance, and art practice critically engaged with the politics of food. She is interested in examining how these local performances may operate nationally and transnationally through an engagement with the politics of food.

Jennifer Goldstein

PhD student, Geography, UCLA
jgoldstein@ucla.edu

Her current research focuses on the specialty coffee industries in Rwanda and Sumatra and the production of taste within the global economy. Other interests include local food systems and the “New Ruralism,” eco-labeling initiatives, theories of terroir and environmentalism, and agricultural development projects, particularly in the global South. She is also exploring using multi-site ethnography as a methodology for researching food. She holds a B.A. in Theory & History of Architecture from Barnard College.

Kelley Gove

Ph.D. student, Cultural Studies, UC Davis.

Kelley Gove is a first year student in the PhD program in Cultural Studies.  She is interested in representations of food and eating in book art, in the history of food science, and in the ways organic and fair trade foods are marketed in the U.S.

Amie Breeze Harper

Ph.D. student, Geography, UC Davis.
alharper@ucdavis.edu

Harper received her B.A. in Geography at Dartmouth College in 1998, and her Masters in Educational Technologies from Harvard University, in 2007, in which her thesis work focused on “performances of whiteness” on a vegan-oriented online forum. Currently, Harper’s research interests focus on the intersections and effects of geopolitical status, race/racialization, consumerism, capitalism, class, sexual orientation, and gender, on alternative nutrition and consumption philosophies of people in the USA (veganism, vegetarianism, raw foodism, organic foods, etc). At the moment, she is interested in how black identified females: 1) are educated to make their food and health choices, 2) are applying meaning and value to health and nutrition, 3) experience the effects of class privileged & white racialized consciousness, in terms of spatial and knowledge production/power within the eco-sustainable food, holistic health, and “cruelty free” consumption movements in USA and ; 4) perform and understand their sense of “blackness” and “liberation” through consumption (dietary and non-dietary).

Harper has written a chapter for the upcoming book, bell hooks reader (SUNY 2008), “Decolonizing the Diet”. She also has a book coming out this year, called Sistah Vegan! Food, Identity, Health and Society: Female Vegans of the African Diaspora in the USA. Her latest working paper is entitled, The Denial of White Racialized Consciousness in the Construction and Praxis of “Ethical” and “Cruelty-Free” Philosophy in the Animal Rights & Vegan Movement in the USA. Her work can be found at www.breezeharper.com

Stacy Jameson

Ph.D. candidate, Cultural Studies, UC Davis.
smjameson@ucdavis.edu

Jameson’s research interests bridge American visual and material culture, with a specific emphasis on food studies. Her dissertation, The Facial Politics of food, explores the relationship between taste, facial and body expression and individual and cultural identity through a critique of popular media representations of eaters in film and television. She received her B. A. in American Studies at Colby College.

Alexis Kargl

Ph.D. student, UC Santa Cruz.
akargl@ucsc.edu

Kargl is interested in examining discursive constructions of ecosystems, bodies, and food, and how these discourses are implicated in racialized and gendered global relations of power. How these discourses relate to notions of rurality, sovereignty, and problematization of borders (between humans and the “environment,” and between/of states) is of particular interest.

Christie McCullen

Ph.D. student, Sociology, UC Santa Cruz.
cmcculle@ucsc.edu

Christie is studying local food initiatives. Specifically, she examines the construction of whiteness at farmers markets and through local food movement discourses. More broadly, Christie is interested in issues of social justice and environmental sustainability.

David Michalski

Ph.D. candidate, Cultural Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, UC Davis.
michalski@ucdavis.edu

Michalski is interested in the social meaning of taste and the creation and maintenance of social value and expertise. These concerns are explored in his dissertation on California wine culture where questions of taste are examined in relation to concepts of history, geography, and aesthetics. Michalski is the author of Cosmos and Damian: a World Trade Center Collage (Bootstrap Press, 2005) and a contributor to Visualizing the City (Routledge, 2008) and Text and Image: Art and the Performance of Memory (Transaction Publishers, 2006), as well as journal articles on urban, visual, and information studies. He holds a Masters degree in American Studies from SUNY Buffalo, and a Masters of Library and Information Studies from CUNY, Queens.

Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern

Ph.D. student, Geography, UC Berkeley.
laminkoff@berkeley.edu

Laura-Anne’s research investigates female Mexican farmers’ production and consumption practices in California, including growing food for market and home use, saving seeds, cultivating new varieties of food crops, and preparing, serving, and selling food. She draws on feminist and agrarian theories of survival and resistance to look at how immigrant women are remaking the industrial agriculture system through their everyday practices. Her work emphasizes approaches from Agrarian Political Ecology, Feminist Geography, and California Food and Agriculture Studies. Past research includes looking at the implementation of the Green Revolution and future for organic agriculture in Guatemala. She holds a B.A. in Sustainable Agriculture and Development with a concentration in Latin American Studies from Cornell University.

Daniel Nemser

Ph.D. student, Spanish and Portuguese, UC Berkeley.
dnemser@gmail.com

His research focuses on mapping the intersections between race, space, and foodways in colonial Mexico City. He is also interested in contemporary struggles revolving around food politics and social justice, and is part of the Radio Zapatista collective, which reports on Mexican politics on KPFA.

Martin Renner

Ph.D. student, History, UC Santa Cruz.
mrenner@ucsc.edu

Martin’s dissertation explores early critiques of the industrial food system by nutrition and agriculture scientists, physicians, and dentists from the 1920s to the 1950s.  He seeks to explain why these critics were professionally and publicly marginalized by the 1960s. His research and teaching interests focus on environmental history and the history of science, technology, and medicine

Jee-Eun R. Song

Cultural Studies Graduate Program
jrsong@ucdavis.edu

Song’s primary areas of research include questions of transnational consumer cultures, food practices, and globalization in Asia, with a particular focus on the recent emergence of commercial coffee houses in South Korea. In her dissertation entitled, “Building an Empire One Cup at a Time: Cultural Meaning and Power of Starbucks Korea,” she is specifically interested in the political economy of coffee for the
development of consumption practices in South Korea and the complex meanings attached to circumscribed leisure environments for negotiating the advent of “globality” - the global nature of social relationships and interdependencies - and the continuing contradictions of U.S.-Korea
relations.

Song holds a BA in English Literature and American Studies from the University of New Hampshire.

Alex Toledano

Ph.D. student, History, UC Berkeley.
toledano@berkeley.edu

Toledano’s work is interested in the social and cultural meaning of eating and drinking. Currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program in History at UC Berkeley, his dissertation is focused on the transformation of Paris — its population, neighborhoods, and sociability — from the end of World War II to the 1980s. He has recently finished a project on food culture and its relationship to political ideology among recent immigrants to Tel Aviv during the 1920s. He received his A.B. in Art History from Princeton University in 2004.