Lecture on shaping American foodways

Monday, February 20, 2012

Dr. Rebecca Sharpless, associate professor of history from TCU, will address the intersections between food, work and identity in the lives of a particular group of African American women On Tuesday, Feb. 21, at 3 p.m. in the Peggy V. Helmerich Browsing Room of the Edmon Low Library. A reception and book signing will follow.

Sharpless’s talk titled “Domestic Workers and the Shaping of American Foodways,” will offer her research for the 2010 book, Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960. Southern cooking is a fusion cuisine, blended from numerous elements, and after the Civil War, African American cooks took the foodways of their African and slave ancestors and blended them with the preferences of their employers to create a distinctive regional cuisine. Food also shaped the daily routines of hundreds of thousands of these women, as it became a vehicle for earning a living. This talk will focus on food as both a product and a process in southern kitchens.

This Research Week lecture is presented by Women's Faculty Council with support from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Technology Transfer. For more information, click here and scroll down.