COURSE DESCRIPTION

 

Food and drink serve as both the subject and the object of historical analysis. This course offers students the opportunity to engage with world history and culture through the context of consumption and society. We will give particular attention to the role in which food/drink (consumption) play in the construction of social, political, and cultural identities. Students will consider critical responses to culture, including the resistance and refusal of consumption, as well as the attempted mobilization of consumption toward social and political change. How is food/ drink different in these contexts, from other sorts of commodities?

We will, at times, adopt a case-study approach and work in class will be based on the analysis of primary sources and discussion of secondary sources. This seminar takes up a series of interesting questions through weekly discussions led by you. For example, questions may range from: What is considered acceptable or unacceptable behavior with whom or how we consume? How does technology, politics, tradition, religion, and other aspects of culture influence our understanding of food and drink? How do food and drink customs, as well as human practices (i.e., production, preparation, and consumption) inform and prescribe a variety of forces – including communal policies, economic and class conditions, gender, and cultural beliefs?

EXPECTATIONS

This class is a high level, reading intensive seminar. Each week you will need to prepare certain readings before class, which we will discuss in detail. We will also examine a variety of textual, visual, and oral primary sources collectively in order to become familiar with the data historians use in order to study popular culture. Over the course of the semester, students will be expected to conduct original research; informed by our collective readings and conversations, this research will combine primary sources and scholarly literature to illuminate further one aspect of food/drink/consumption in world history. This research, along with our engagement of contemporary scholarship and primary sources, will enable us to come to provisional answers to the course’s guiding questions, which remain productively unresolved among the scholarly community.

 

OBJECTIVES

At the end of this course, students will have

• developed their knowledge and understanding of key historical events, processes, and themes related to beliefs about food and drink consumption in world history
• developed their ability to frame historical questions and think critically about the significance of and connections among historical events and developments
• strengthened their analytical and critical reading skills, including analyzing both primary and secondary sources
• developed their ability to express their historical analyses and syntheses in writing and orally more clearly, concisely, coherently, and elegantly.