CfP: Food and...
The
Humanities Center at Texas Tech University (Lubbock, Texas) is happy to
announce a call for papers for our first Annual Conference in the
Humanities. The conference topic each year aligns with the Center’s
annual theme, which for 2017-2018 is “Food and …”. Ways into the "what"
following the ellipsis in "Food and..." may fall into myriad
categories: culture, literature, politics, environment, technology,
health, malnutrition, access, education, inequities, media
representations, depictions in fine art, sustainability, ecology(s),
local food, translation, small scale agriculture, agribusiness, taboo,
packaging, eating disorders, marketing, terroir, and gastronomy. This
list is not exhaustive.
The explosion of food studies at
the end of the twentieth century was an institutional response to the
myriad ways in which food might be approached by scholars, and the field
has only expanded in the intervening years. Humanistic ways of looking
at food run the gamut from primary source in material culture to
semiotic tool; from literary trope to exchangeable commodity; from
colonial weapon to method of cultural resistance; from obsession either
due to absence or to fetish; from comfort, reassurance, and sustenance
to oddity or source of disgust; from sin to salvation; from welcoming
gesture to coercive faux hospitality; and from political bribe to
political rallying point. “Food and . . . ” crosses disciplines and
invites many kinds of thinkers and critical conversations. We all eat,
yet what counts as appealing, nourishing, traditional food in one
culture is repulsive in another. As the introduction to a recent
anthology of essays on food and theatre notes, food carries "symbolic
and material unwieldiness," showing "comestibles and their consumption
to be both bedrock and flashpoints of cultural identity." The myriad
conceptualizations and human experiences of food offer the critic, the
thinker, and the eater a prime node of analysis—a "place at the table"
of intellectual and public discourse.
The conference aims
to bring together an international group of scholars in order to
interrogate the polyvalent uses of food in human life.
Prominent foodcritic and memoirist Ruth Reichl will offer the conference
keynote lecture and performance artists Spatula and Barcode will
present an interactive seder as the all-conference dinner on Friday,
March 30th—the first night of Passover.
The TTU
Humanities Center welcomes abstracts for individual papers as well as
proposals for fully formed panels that address these or other related
issues. Potential speakers should send an abstract of 300 words and a
brief CV (no more than 2 pages) highlighting work relevant to the topic
at hand. Scholars proposing a panel should provide an abstract of no
more than 500 words and include a list of contributors (with the titles
of their papers) as well as brief CVs (no more than 2 pages) for each.
Abstracts and panel proposals should be submitted to humanitiescenter@ttu.edu by
October 15, 2017 with all documents contained in a single PDF. In the
subject line of your submission, please use the format
“Food Conference/YOUR NAME/YOUR PROPOSAL or ABSTRACT TITLE”
(e.g., Food Conference/Smith/Eating Rules) as the subject line in your
email. We will make decisions as soon as possible after that in order to
ensure sufficient time for participants to make travel arrangements.