Atlantic World Research Network

Call for Papers

Atlantic World Foodways: The Carolina Lowcountry, Italy, and Spain
An International, Interdisciplinary Conference Featuring Scholars and Chefs
Presented by the Atlantic World Research Network and Quaintance-Weaver 
http://www.uncg.edu/eng/awrn/

January 30-February 2, 2014
The Proximity and O.Henry Hotels, Greensboro, NC
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Elliott University Center

Featured Speakers: David Shields, Professor of English, University of South Carolina
Jessica B. Harris, Professor of English, Queen’s College, CUNY
John Dickie, Professor of Italian Studies, University College, London

Mini-Banquets: Prepared by Award-Winning Chefs 

The Atlantic World Research Network, in partnership with Quaintance-Weaver Restaurants and Hotels, presents a unique feast of ideas and food—an international and interdisciplinary conference exploring three great transatlantic foodways: Carolina Lowcountry, Italian, and Spanish. Featuring famed food scholars and leading chefs, our conference will bring together inquiring minds and discerning palates as we ask how transatlantic contact combined and transformed old foodways, and how those foodways have transformed us all. Conference activities will include multiple themed banquets and distinctive foodway demonstrations by featured chefs, and our exciting venues will include Greensboro’s Proximity, America’s greenest hotel, which proves that sustainability, beauty, and comfort can all share the same address. http://www.proximityhotel.com/

Our conference will explore distinctive foodways of the past—Pre-Columbian Mayan, Medieval and Renaissance Spanish and Italian, Pre-Imperial African, Colonial and Antebellum Carolina Lowcountry—and will trace how distinctive food staples and flavors collided and combined with other foodways from around the Atlantic Rim to support whole new hybrid populations and cultures. We also will consider the growth and flourishing of the contemporary food recovery movement, which seeks out heirloom seeds, heritage breeds of livestock, and archival recipes to reproduce the eating experiences of our varied ancestors, and to revive the best (though perhaps to avoid the worst?) of their diets and flavors. In the process, we will consider the achievements, and the limits, of recovery food research and practice, as well as of the locavore and slow food movements that have done so much to make us intelligent, appreciative, conscientious—and sometimes obsessive and anxious—eaters. Paper and panel topics also will include the role of varied foodways in the literary imagination, the media, and the arts; the tensions between ecological and economic food sustainability; the science of food recovery, augmentation and genetic modification; the role of food in shaping historical events and developments; and the politics of food regulation and prohibition.

Three famed Atlantic World Foodways Scholars whose research covers the breadth of the Atlantic experience have accepted our invitation to join us as plenary speakers (see above and below).
Renowned Atlantic World Foodways Chefs will prepare unforgettable themed lunches and mini-banquets and reflect on the meaning of food recovery research and the craft of their world-class cuisines.

We invite proposals for papers and full panels in a variety of disciplines, including (but not necessarily limited to): history, food biology and zoology, classical and modern languages and literatures, culinary arts, media studies, anthropology, women’s and gender studies, ethnography, art, religion, rhetoric, communications, musicology, broadcast and cinema, and hospitality management. Interdisciplinary panel proposals and papers with interdisciplinary focus or potential are particularly welcome.
Proposals must be submitted via e-mail. For 15-20-minute papers, send a 250-word titled abstract; for a complete 3-4-person panel, send an overall title and individual 250-word titled abstracts for each paper.  Please indicate AWF 2014 in your subject line and include a 1-page CV giving an e-mail and a regular mail address at which you can be reached; and indicate any expected audio-visual needs (including special software needs).

Send submissions for AWF 2014 to: awrn@uncg.edu
Due date for submissions: September 16, 2013

About our Featured Speakers:
                 

--David Shields teaches Southern Literature and Culture at the University of South Carolina, and is the dean of Southern food scholars and partner with Charleston’s Sean Brock in the recovery of heirloom crops and livestock that led to the creation of Husk restaurant;

--Jessica Harris teaches African-American Literature and Culture at Queens College in New York, and is America’s leading scholar of the foodways of the African Atlantic, as well as a noted culinary author and founder of Africooks.com;

--John Dickie teaches Italian Studies at the University of London, and is a widely recognizes at the leading historian of Italian Mafia culture; his is also author of Delizia! on Italian foodways).

--The conference will be headquartered at the Proximity Hotel, with sessions also at the O.Henry Hotel and at the Elliott University Center, a state-of-the-art facility on the UNCG campus in the heart of Greensboro—an historic American city which has witnessed the Revolutionary Battle of Guilford Courthouse in 1781, the collapse of the Confederate cabinet in 1865, and the birth of the Sit-In Movement in 1960.

--Blocks of rooms have been reserved at the Proximity, America’s leading green hotel, and at the O.Henry Hotel, both near the UNCG campus. For details beginning in September 2013, see http://www.uncg.edu/eng