The Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies and the Southern Foodways Alliance will host a graduate student symposium September 12-13, here on the University of Mississippi campus.
MA and PhD students from across campus and across the nation will present scholarship focused on the SFA programming theme of women, work, and food. Our goals are to mentor students, strengthen their presentation skills, and give them a good opportunity to share their research while promoting interdisciplinary and nuanced conversations about foodways.
My personal goal is to get a whirlwind tour of ascendant foodways scholarship. Based on the sampling of papers below, I think I’ll get my fix. Though the event is mostly an invitational, we will have a few tickets available to the public. Contact us if you would like to come.
In addition to a dinner from the folks at Felicia Suzanne’s, a lunch by BTC Grocery, a keynote lecture, “Dishing Up Dixie in the Post-Racial South” by Kimberly Wallace-Sanders of Emory University, and a discussion on domestic imagery in the film Mildred Pierce by novelist Megan Abbott and Isom Center assistant director Theresa Starkey, we’ll hear from, among others:
Sara B. Franklin (New York University) “Chew on This: Nuance, Myth, Co-Narration and The Case for Oral History in Contemporary Food Studies”
Virginia Anderson (University of Mississippi) “The Flour on my Mother’s Hands: Belief, Biscuits, and the Embodiment of Southern Motherhood”
Katie Rawson (Emory University) “And the wives shucked them”: Gender, Livelihood, and Seafood Processing in the Gulf South”
Anna Hamilton (University of Mississippi) “Minorcan-ish: Marketing Identity with the Datil Pepper of Saint Augustine”
Ashley Rose Young (Duke University) “From Red Beans and Rice to Oysters Rockefeller: Rethinking Racial Boundaries in New Orleans’ Mid-Twentieth Century”
Alexandra Lampert (New York University) “Resistance, Food and Gender in the Civil Rights Movement”
Danielle Klien and Berlisha Morton (Louisiana State University) “Mammy’s Secret Smile: Challenging Stereotypes and Power Dynamics in the Southern Creole Plantation Kitchen”
