Grad Research: Ph.D. students Kerry Knerr and Elissa Underwood inaugural recipients of Les Dames D’Escoffier, Dallas Chapter Endowed Presidential Fellowships in American Studies

Steve Hoelscher; Mary Kimbrough*, Susan Auler*, Kerry Knerr, Elissa Underwood, Tracey Evers*, Marvin Bendele (Executive Director, Foodways Texas).
* member of Les Dames D’Escoffier, Dallas Chapter

A hearty congratulations to Ph.D. students Kerry Knerr and Elissa Underwood, who have been named the 2016 recipients of the Les Dames D’Escoffier, Dallas Chapter Endowed Presidential Fellowships in American Studies. Les Dames D’Escoffier of Dallas have offered their generous support of American Studies graduate scholarship at UT on topics relating to food studies.

Kerry Knerr’s project, “Cocktails, Class, and Conspicuous Consumption in the Progressive Era U.S.,” examines the early history of the American cocktail and its entanglement with American cultural imperialism. The project will build upon her master’s report, “In Search of a Good Drink: Punches, Cocktails, and Imperial Consumption,” currently under review at Global Food History. In it Kerry argues that understanding the material aspects of alcohol consumption (what people are doing), through close readings of recipe collections and material cultures of public and home bars, can ground otherwise nebulous discourses (what people are saying) of social movements, gender politics, or class formation. Kerry will conduct research at the National Food and Beverage Foundation in New Orleans, which houses both the Southern Food and Beverage Museum and the Museum of the American Cocktail. There she will analyze menus, published cookbooks or bar manuals, private recipe collections, newspaper clippings, and photographs.

Elissa Underwood’s project, “Women and Food in Carceral Spaces,” will explore women’s understandings of and experiences with food and foodways, including specific nutritional needs and distinct relationships with food, during and after incarceration by conducting oral histories with formerly incarcerated women in Texas. Elissa will interview women working and learning or perfecting skills in food-based industries, as well as women who have started their own food-based companies or non-profit organizations specifically aimed at combating recidivism and/or preventing incarceration.

The winners were announced at this year’s Foodways Texas conference, an organization now housed in the Department of American Studies. For more on the conference, check out this very in-depth, fascinating recap of the weekend of festivities.

Faculty Research: Dr. Randy Lewis on Texas Tavola in the Old Country

Today we have a special treat for you: Dr. Randy Lewis has penned this fascinating account of a recent trip he took to Sicily to screen a documentary about Sicilians in East Texas. Enjoy his words and his photos – all the photographs are by him!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I had a remarkable experience over spring break. Along with my partner, the anthropologist Circe Sturm, I headed to Sicily to screen an ethnographic film that we co-produced several years ago. Texas Tavola: A Taste of Sicily in the Lone Star State traces the migration of food, religion, and identity from Sicily to Texas, with a focus on the elaborate rituals associated with the tavola di San Giuseppe (the St. Joseph’s altar). The altar is not just a complex expression of religious devotion and folk creativity by women who prepare dozens of sculptural breads and desserts. It is also a holy banquet to feed the poor, a vegetarian feast for a crowd that can swell into the hundreds in Sicily and East Texas alike.

Bringing the film to Sicily was a long time coming. Although it had appeared at academic conferences and a number of universities in the US, a lack of subtitles had kept the film out of wide circulation in Italy. We were lucky that a graduate student at the University of Sienna, Maria Grazia Candido, decided to subtitle the film for her MA project, suddenly allowing it to find a new life in Italy. Would Sicilians recognize Sicilian-Americans as their own? Would they get past the Texas accents and oversized belt buckles to care about distant relatives they had never met? Would they be interested at all? That’s what we were here to discover.

Taking us hundreds of miles around the island, the screenings brought us to urban universities in wonderfully grand ballrooms, smaller cities filled with baroque architecture, and rural villages in the western countryside. I’m writing at greater length about this experience elsewhere, so for now I’ll simply describe the final screening in the western Sicilian town of Poggioreale.

Once a stately town with a concert hall, Poggioreale was destroyed by earthquake in 1968, languished in a corrupt rebuilding process for two decades, and finally rebuilt down the hill in a sad modernist parody of the original. The mayor had invited us to show our film in the modest town hall on the feast day of St. Joseph, when elaborate altars are set up in the towns of the surrounding valley. We were arriving at the same time as a group of Circe’s relatives who were visiting the Sicilian altars for the first time. Quite by accident, three generations of Sicilian-Texan women and one delightful fellow named Ross, most of whom had appeared in Texas Tavola, would be converging on their ancestral home while I shot a constant stream of video and photos.

We had a powerful screening in this final stop—for us as filmmakers and, I think, for our audience. What we had done was relatively simple: we had recorded the ancient rituals of a small town thriving in a faraway place. But for this small act of ethnographic attention to the improbable flow of global culture, the community was effusively grateful, presenting us bouquets of flowers, equally florid speeches, and a generous luncheon in a town with scant resources. The mayor spoke, the deputy mayor spoke, even the “baby mayor” spoke with impressive authority (he is a 12 year old who wears a tri-color sash to indicate his official role as a junior politician). The Sicilians marveled that Texans still constructed altars in the old ways, taking over an entire house to construct something that would last only a few days like some sort of mezzogiorno “Burning Man.” One bystander said what was happening in Texas was “like something from Sicily 200 years ago.” Old people cried and shook our hands like we had found a long lost relative, which, in a modest sense, we had.

Foodways TX: Dispatches from the Annual Foodways TX Symposium

Image by Kelly Yandell

Last week, College Station played host to Foodways Texas’s Annual Symposium, centering on the theme “Farm to Market 2014.” In case you missed it – and we hope that this will serve as a call for you folks to attend the next! – enjoy this fascinating and detailed write-up of the symposium from Kelly Yandell. We’ve pasted an excerpt below that explains what the symposium offers; the full post detailing some of the conversations that occurred (and some more of her wonderful photos) can be found here.

We meet yearly in support of a greater academic archiving project run through the University of Texas to document the diverse cultures of Texas. In fact, Foodways Texas just became a permanent part of UT’s American Studies Department. The panels, talks, and discussions this year were centered on the topic of agriculture at the aptly titled Farm to Market 2014: 4th Annual Foodways Texas Symposium. This alone would have been enough to hold my attention for two days. And, the meals at the symposium would have been enough to justify the cost of admission had there been no discussions at all.

But the enduring draw of this event is the fascinating group of people that it brings together.  We are scholars, writers, farmers, ranchers, chefs, food lovers, entrepreneurs, photographers, scientists, and all manner of other professionals and people who simply love Texas, Texas food and foodways, and Texas history and cultures. This is not to say by any means that we all share the same point of view on some of these thorny agricultural topics.  In fact, with a group this diverse it is virtually guaranteed that our interests, backgrounds, and opinions will diverge. But the very convivial nature of the gathering ensures that we all seek each other out and use it as an opportunity to think, more so than to merely form opinions. The time limitations and the number of topics covered mean that we barely scratch the surface of the topics we approach; however, for many of us it is the first time we have ever considered the lives and businesses of some of our peers.