In our first research seminar of the year Roland Chen and Aryehi Bhushan, two doctoral students at the University of Oxford, will be sharing their fascinating interdisciplinary food-based research. There will be time for questions, discussion, and networking over a plethora of snacks.

Roland Chen, ‘My Food Art’.
Roland is an academic and artist at the Internet Institute interested in technology, bodies, place, nature, and media (broadly defined). His academic work focuses on wearable technology and its relationship to body and place, and his food-based art practice centres on cyborging, simulation, and our porousness with the outside. He attended culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu in Tokyo as well. He will be presenting on his current thinking around his art practice, which focuses on sport, food production, pharmaceuticals, machines and food, and artificial flavourings. He will bring some works he has completed and planned in the near future, and would appreciate any critiques or feedback.

Aryehi Bhushan, ‘Vegetarian Monsters and Vomited Verse: Poetry, Embodiment and Carnivorous Politics in Anita Desai’s “In Custody”’.
Aryehi is a second-year DPhil candidate at the Faculty of English, writing a thesis on consumption and ‘consumability’ in contemporary Anglophone Indian women’s novels from 1980 to the present. Her paper will look at the way in which Anita Desai problematises the dichotomies of vegetarianism/non-vegetarianism, Hinduism/Islam and Hindi/Urdu prose in her novel “In Custody”; specifically the ways in which she constructs a resistive carnivorous politics to push back against an established socio-political Hindu (and Hindi) hegemony.

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