Join us for a special keynote lecture by Heather J Sharkey, Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Pennsylvania. During the 2024-25 year, Heather is the Oliver Smithies Fellow at Balliol College of Oxford University. This year she has also been a senior fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, where she co-organised a Winter School on “Commensality and Cultural Heritage in the Middle East and Its Diasporas.” Her books include Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (University of California Press 2003), American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (Princeton University Press 2008), and A History of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2017). With Jeffrey Edward Green, she edited The Changing Terrain of Religious Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press 2021). She is currently writing a book about global microhistory in the Nile Valley. She regularly teaches a seminar at Penn on the history of food in the Middle East. She also edits a book series for Edinburgh University Press on “Food and Foodways in the Middle East, North Africa, and Its Diasporas.”
Abstract: What is Food Studies, why and how is this interdisciplinary field flourishing, and what does it offer? I will address these questions through a case study of the potato, which migrated in the modern era from the Andean coast of South America to Europe and Africa before circulating widely in Asia. Viewing the potato through a micro-historical lens, I will consider Vincent Van Gogh’s 1885 oil painting, The Potato Eaters. This canvas, I will argue, can help us to see patterns of globalization and trade along with developments in agriculture; health and diet; art and cuisine, and more. It can also help us to appreciate the symbolic value of food as it bears upon religion, labor, class, and kinship. In sum, this study of potatoes and The Potato Eaters suggests some important reasons for the value and appeal of Food Studies: the field offers wide spaces for exploring human existence by following the “social lives” of relatable and often everyday things.
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