About

Again we'd like to welcome you to the Early Modern Food Network: a collaborative space for students and scholars of the Early Modern period (c.a. 1500-1800) to discuss issues relevant to food, diet, and consumption. While we hope to increase the number of regular contributors and moderators on the blog, the Early Modern Food Network traces its humble origins to two graduate students both working with the burgeoning field of food studies.

Rachel (thewanderingmuse)

Burney is the greatest of my literary amours.

The technical stuff: I'm a doctoral student and Associate Instructor at Indiana University, specializing in "long" eighteenth-century British literature and culture (roughly 1660-1830), gender and sexuality studies, theories of consumption, science and medicine. More recently, I've turned my attention to scientific, medical, and literary discourses surrounding eighteenth-century concerns with dietetics and, specifically, the female body. I am interested in thinking about how diet becomes increasingly gendered and, moreover, how this relates to shifting attitudes toward the question of women's "slenderness." To complicate matters further--since food is literally everywhere--I am trying to think about this very specific line of inquiry in relation to how women's roles as purchases, preparers, moderators, and distributors of food in the home seemingly conflate with the pervasive cultural metaphor of "taste" and the manifest anxiety eighteenth-century society exhibited toward women as economic, cultural, and sexual consumers. Indeed, "consumption" is becoming an increasingly vexed and yet crucial term for my current projects. I look forward to the suggestions of my peers and colleagues here on the Early Modern Food Network.


The fun stuff: In my "spare" time I am a karaoke bar enthusiast whose set list would not be complete without "Bohemian Rhapsody," "Total Eclipse of the Heart," and "Gangster's Paradise." I also play piano, attend the stunning plays and operas here in Bloomington, and look for any excuse to go on rollercoasters, avoid grading at all costs, and hide from tornadoes.

Contact: Besides the "Submissions" page, you can contact me through Twitter (WanderingMuse18), Facebook, and/or my other blog, Infamous Scribblers. As part of the "professional" portion of my new year's resolution, I am trying to maintain more of a presence on the social networking sites that are increasingly populated by professionals. Here's to hoping this resolution is more successful from some of my other endeavors goals--like not letting my constant research of food make me hungry...all the time!

Rob

I'm a doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, specializing in late medieval and early modern literature, particularly drama, particularly comedy. My work focuses on food, animals,  and agriculture and examines how literature negotiates complex relationships between humans, animals, and landscapes. I've conceived of my dissertation project as a literary history of medieval and early modern foodways and foodsheds. I am interested in thinking about how poets and playwrights deploy food imagery as a marker of difference between human and animal, producer and consumer, men and women, urban and  rural, and how these boundaries change at different points along the foodway from farm to table. My hope is that this will prove revealing not only for our understanding of early modern English literature and culture, but that it will reveal something about our present day food economy as well.

Rather than prepare for my comprehensive exams and dissertation prospectus in the isolation of library cubicle, I would like to use this blog as a public forum for thinking my way through the texts I am using.