Editorial Board
Editor in Chief
DARRA GOLDSTEIN
Darra Goldstein, the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian, Emerita at Williams College, is the founding editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. Hailed as “a New Yorker for foodies,” Gastronomica won multiple awards under her editorship and in 2012 was named Publication of the Year by the James Beard Foundation. She continues to serve as the founding series editor of California Studies in Food and Culture from the University of California Press.
Over the years Goldstein has published widely on food, literature, culture, and art and has organized several exhibitions, including Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age and Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500-2005, both at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Her most recent monograph is The Kingdom of Rye: A Brief History of Russian Food (University of California Press, 2022), longlisted for the André Simon award and winner of the Mary W. Klinger Award from the Society of Ethnobotany. Other publications include the James Beard-nominated Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets (OUP, 2015), for which she served as Editor in Chief, and six award-winning cookbooks: A Taste of Russia, The Georgian Feast (the 1994 IACP Julia Child Cookbook of the Year), The Winter Vegetarian, Baking Boot Camp at the CIA, Fire and Ice: Classic Nordic Cooking, and, most recently, Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore, named one of the 10 best cookbooks of 2020 by Forbes, Esquire, and the Washington Post.
Goldstein has consulted for the Council of Europe as part of an international group exploring ways in which food can be used to promote tolerance and diversity, and under her editorship the volume Culinary Cultures of Europe: Identity, Diversity and Dialogue was published in 2005. In 2013 she was named Distinguished Fellow in Food Studies at the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto, and in 2016 was honored with a Macgeorge Fellowship at the University of Melbourne. In 2020 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Her latest recognitions include the 2022 Sakhe(l)ebi Prize for deepening the bilateral relations between Georgia and the U.S.. Goldstein currently sits on the advisory board of the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts and is a member of the advisory “Kitchen Cabinet” for the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
Area Editors
ALEX BLANCHETTE
Alex Blanchette is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University. His research is concerned with the politics of industrial labor and life in the post-industrial United States. He is author of the award-winning book Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm (Duke University Press 2020) and co-editor with Sarah Besky of the award-winning How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet (SAR/UNM Press 2019).
PAUL FREEDMAN
Paul Freedman is the Chester D. Tripp Professor of History at Yale where he has taught since 1997. Before that he was at Vanderbilt University. His teaching and research over many years has concentrated on the history of the Middle Ages (particularly in Catalonia). His 1999 book, Images of the Medieval Peasant, received several awards, including the Haskins Medal from the Medieval Academy of America. The history of food and cuisine is a relatively recent interest. In 2007 Freedman edited Food: The History of Taste, translated into eleven languages. He is the author of Ten Restaurants that Changed America, (2016), American Cuisine and How It Got This Way, (2019) and Why Food Matters (2021). A children’s book on American history through food, entitled “Bite by Bite,” will be published in 2024.
NINA MACKERT
Nina Mackert is a historian and research associate in the interdisciplinary "LeipzigLab - Global Health." Her focus is on the North American and Transatlantic history of culture and knowledge, especially the history of the body, health, food and nutrition, critical ability studies, and the new history of capitalism. She is currently completing her habilitation thesis on the American and transatlantic history of the calorie. Her research has been supported by the Volkswagen Foundation, the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. She is a member of the editorial board of "Body Politics" and co-founder and editor of the blog "Food, Fatness, Fitness—Critical Perspectives."
DAVID SUTTON
David Sutton is Professor of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, he also teaches regularly at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. Since the early 1990s he has been conducting research on the island of Kalymnos concerned with memory, food, and experiences of continuity and change. He has published four books based on this research: Memories Cast in Stone: The Relevance of the Past in Everyday Life (Berg, 1998) which explores Kalymnian historical consciousness, Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (Berg, 2001), and Secrets from the Greek Kitchen: Cooking, Skill and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island (California, 2014), and Bigger Fish to Fry: A Theory of Cooking as Risk, With Greek Examples (2021). These latter explore food and cooking practices in relation to questions of memory, history, gender and technology. Other relevant publications on memory, sensory experience and the politics of contemporary food practices include “‘Memory as a Sense: A Gustemological Approach,” (Food, Culture and Society, 2011), and ““Revivifying Commensality: Eating, Politics and the Sensory Production of the Social.” (In V. Nazarea & T. Gagnon eds. Gardens of Memory: Itineraries and Sanctuaries, 2021). He served as a judge for the James Beard Foundation Journalism award in 2023-24. He is a member of the board and co-editor of the weblog for the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, where he also hosts a series of video interviews on the origins and development of food anthropology (https://foodanthro.com/food-anthropology-history/).
LESLEY A. WOLFF
Lesley A. Wolff is Assistant Professor of Art and Design at the University of Tampa, where she specializes in modern and contemporary art history and museum studies. Wolff’s scholarship and teaching engage the intersections of art, heritage, and foodways in Mexico, the Caribbean, and the US. She is co-editor of the volume Nourish and Resist: Food and Feminisms in Contemporary Global Caribbean Art (Yale University Press 2024) as well as the special journal issue of Arts dedicated to “Rethinking Contemporary Latin American Art” (2024). Her single-authored book, Culinary Palettes: The Visuality of Food in Postrevolutionary Mexican Art, is forthcoming in early 2025 from the University of Texas Press. As a curator, Wolff is committed to revisionist art histories of the Americas, and she has collaborated with museums and galleries across the US. Since 2019, Wolff has served as an Executive Officer with the international Association for Latin American Art.
ANNA ZEIDE
Anna Zeide is Associate Professor of History at Virginia Tech. She is also the founding director of the Food Studies Program in the College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences. She studies food as a way of understanding environmental change, dynamic cultural practices, consumer behavior, technology, health, and justice. Her first book, Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry (University of California Press, 2018), won a James Beard media award in 2019. She co-edited Acquired Tastes: Stories About the Origins of Modern Foods (MIT Press, 2021) authored US History in 15 Foods (Bloomsbury Press, 2023), and is working on a history of food waste and a family history project.
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Founding Board Members
FEBE ARMANIOS
Febe Armanios is Professor of History at Middlebury College. Her research focuses on the history of Christian communities in the Middle East, especially of Egypt’s Copts, on the study of comparative religious practices, and on food history and media studies. She has been awarded fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Luce Foundation-ACLS, and Fordham University, among others. She’s been a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School (ILSP), has served on the editorial board for the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and is currently an editorial board member of the Journal of Religious Minorities under Muslim Rule. In 2021-22, she was the Bennett Boskey Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at Williams College. She is also founding co-Director of Middlebury College’s Axinn Center for the Humanities. Armanios is the author of Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford UP, 2011) and co-author with Boğaç Ergene of the award-winning Halal Food: A History (Oxford UP, 2018). She’s currently completing a book-length project on the history of Christian television (terrestrial and satellite) in the Middle East (ca. 1981-present) and has also begun research for another book project, which looks at the history of Christian food practices in Ottoman and post-Ottoman regions, including Egypt, Cyprus, Lebanon, Greece, and Turkey.
TOM PHILPOTT
Tom Philpott is a senior research associate at the Center for a Livable Future (Johns Hopkins University). He is the former food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones (2011-2022) and food editor and columnist at Grist (2006-2011). His 2020 book Perilous Bounty was named an “editor’s pick” by The New York Times Book Review and shortlisted for a New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. It came out in paperback in June 2022. Perilous Bounty has received in-depth reviews in The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books.
PSYCHE A. WILLIAMS-FORSON
Psyche A. Williams-Forson is professor and chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland College Park. She is author of Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America (winner of the James Beard Media Award for Food Issues and Advocacy, 2023); co-editor of Taking Food Public: Redefining Food in a Changing World (2013); and, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (winner of the Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize, American Folklore Society). She is known nationally and internationally for her work in building the scholarly subfield of Black food studies, and she has published numerous articles on topics such as Black women, food, and power; food and literature; food and sustainability; race, food, and design thinking; eating and workplace cultures; as well as the historical legacies of race and gender (mis)representation, with (and without) food. She has also been interviewed on numerous podcasts, in several news articles, and for documentaries, including Al Roker's "Family Style" (NBC Today), Netflix’s "Ugly Delicious," and The Invisible Vegan. Dr. Williams-Forson is an affiliate faculty member of the Theatre, Dance, and Performing Studies, the Departments of African American Studies, Anthropology, The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity.