Women's Work: How Culinary Cultures Shaped Modern Spain

About the talk...

Famous chefs, Michelin stars, culinary techniques and gastronomical accolades attract moneyed tourists to Spain from all over the world. Even with this global attention, we know little about how Spanish cooking became a litmus test for demonstrating Spain's modernity and, relatedly, the roles ascribed to the modern Spanish women responsible for daily cooking.

Ingram will present her new book Women's Work and discuss how efforts to articulate a new, modern Spain infiltrated multiple genres and media, including those about food. Culinary writing engaged debates about women's roles in Spanish society and reached women at the site of much of their daily labor--the kitchen--and shaped thinking about their roles in modernizing Spain.

About the speaker...

Rebecca Ingram is Professor of Spanish Languages, Cultures and Literatures, Honors Faculty Liaison, and the Interim Director of Interdisciplinary Humanities at the University of San Diego. Professor Ingram’s research involves food cultural studies in relation to Spain. She is the author of (Vanderbilt, 2022). Her volume, co-edited with Eugenia Afinoguénova and Lara Anderson, will be published later in 2024. In 2020, the Bulletin of Spanish Studies published the special issue she and Anderson edited titled “Transhispanic Food Cultural Studies,” the first extended study of food as a cultural text within the broader fields of Iberian and Latin American Cultural Studies.

Lecture presented in collaboration with Culinaria.

Host or Publisher Northrop Frye Centre