Detailed Information
CANCELLED AE-HN515- Food: A Global History
Experiences with hunger and eating cut across all time periods and societies. And yet, the role and relationships of foods are ever changing. Every food has a history. These play out through global and local contexts, with globalisation and transport networks bringing new products to our plates and in so doing changing diets and palates, while also entrenching power structures and environments. In this course we will explore the history of food using a global perspective. In so doing we will cover larger historical concepts, from gender and environmental histories to colonialism, capitalism, and culture. We will track key food items to explore connected and entangled histories that provide learners with the understanding of global history centred on specific (and edible) materials. From potatoes and pineapples to tea and cocktails, this course will make historical stops from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries in order to investigate societal changes and commodities networks. This course provides the historical contexts and gives an introduction to larger events through the lens of common foods that most learners will have tasted but will never look at the same way again.
Duration: 4 Mondays
Time: 18:00-20:00
Dates: 30 Sept, 7, 14, 21 Oct
• Amuse Bouche: Global History and Food Culture
• Starters: Fruits and Veg
• Main Course: Meat and Potatoes
• Dessert: Sugar, Tea and Coffee
All readings for this course will be electronic and range from academic journal articles and book chapters, to videos, podcasts and images. A reading list will be provided at the start of the course and no materials will be needed in advance
At the end of this course, learners will be able to outline the underpinnings of global history; evaluate historical sources; discuss historical debates, and explain long histories of key food items and the societal and environmental changes they have produced
Each class will be divided between a lecture (for the first half of the session) and group discussions (for the second half of the session). The lecture will provide an introduction to the weekly topic and give a larger overview to the case studies we will be looking at in the second half of the session. Learners will be provided with a range of sources, from primary text and secondary scholarship to video clips and visual images. There will be no assessments.
Dr Jeremiah Garsha is an Assistant Professor in Global History at UCD. He was awarded his PhD in World History from the University of Cambridge, where he also competed an MPhil in African Studies. Dr Garsha is a cultural history who works on histories of colonialism and postcolonialism, with a focus on Africa and Oceanic geographical topics in the twentieth century.