Past Conferences

2018: The Future of Food Studies

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Learn more about our 2017 and 2015 conferences here.

The Future of Food Studies at #GAFS18

The Graduate Association for Food Studies is pleased to announce the third annual Future of Food Studies graduate student conference, to be held October 4 – 6, 2018, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. This year our keynote is Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson, acclaimed food studies scholar, Chair of American Studies at the University of Maryland, and author of Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, & Power (UNC Press). Dr. Julie Guthman who is a professor of Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the author of Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (UC Press) will deliver a plenary address. A professional development panel on the topic of academic and alt-ac food writing will bring together three diverse voices including Kim Severson (New York Times food correspondent), Dr. Steven Alvarez (Assistant Professor of English at St. John’s University and creator of “taco literacy”), and Dr. Ashley Rose Young (writer and historian at the American Food History Project at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History). The conference will feature an interdisciplinary range of presentations and panels from a diverse cohort of graduate students affiliated with universities and institutions across the United States and the globe. Additionally, a select number of these papers will be considered for publication in an issue of the Graduate Journal of Food Studies, a peer-reviewed graduate journal for food-related research.

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2017: The Future of Food Studies

St. Louis, Missouri | October 19 – 21, 2017
Presented by the Graduate Association for Food Studies with major funding from Washington University of St. Louis and support from the Umbra Institute

The Graduate Association for Food Studies hosted its second annual Future of Food Studies graduate student conference, October 19-21, 2017, at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. The keynote speaker was Professor Krishnendu Ray, acclaimed food studies scholar and chair of the Food Studies department at New York University. Professor Alison Alkon of the University of the Pacific delivered the plenary address on food justice. Additionally, a select number of student papers presented at the conference were considered for publication in the Graduate Journal of Food Studies, an open-source, peer-reviewed graduate journal publishing food-related research.

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2015: The Inaugural Future of Food Studies

Cambridge, Massachusetts | October 23 – 25, 2015
Presented by the Graduate Association for Food Studies with major funding from the Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University

The Graduate Association for Food Studies held the first Future of Food Studies conference in 2015. In addition to 40 paper presentations by graduate students from throughout the United States and the world, the conference featured two keynote speakers: Professor Fabio Parasecoli, acclaimed food studies scholar and coordinator of the Food Studies program at the New School, and Joyce Chaplin, Professor of Early American History at Harvard University.