Taste This

The James & Marguerite Hutchins Lecture Series | Event: November 9, 2022 |

The Center for the Study of the American South is honored to host a conversation with Psyche Williams-Forson and Tressie McMillan Cottom who will discuss Williams-Forson’s Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America (UNC Press, 2022). This event is made possible by the James & Marguerite Hutchins Lecture Series.  In her new work, Williams-Forson examines how anti-Black racism surrounds eating. Distorted views of how and what Black people eat are pervasive, bolstering the belief that they must be corrected and regulated. Sustainable culture—what keeps a community alive and thriving—is essential to Black peoples’ fight for access and equity, and food is central to this fight. Learn more.

"As a scholar of African American life and culture, Dr. Williams-Forson is an often sought-after speaker who discusses everything from African American foodways to the importance of food in workplaces and the meanings of Juneteenth beyond food. She coined the phrase “Black Women, Food, and Power” and has spoken extensively on topics such as food and literature; food and sustainability; race, food, and design thinking; eating and workplace cultures; as well as the ways that Black people’s race and gender have been continuously misrepresented in visual and textual media. Williams-Forson also has written extensively about African American history and life in reviews, articles, and magazines.

She frequently keynotes and speaks at universities, colleges, communities, corporations, and museums throughout the United States and abroad. Dr. Williams-Forson has also curated two exhibits –Fire and Freedom (for the National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine) – and Still Cookin by the Fireside: African-Americans in Food Service, an online exhibition, that examined African-American history from the colonial era to the present.

Dr. Williams-Forson serves on the editorial board for many journals including the Journal of Food and Foodways; International Journal of Food Design; the Journal of American Studies; and The Journal of Women, Gender, and Families, among many others. She also serves on the board of the Southern Food and Beverage and is a founding member of the Southern Foodways Alliance. Dr. Psyche is also the recipient of numerous fellowships including a Smithsonian Museum Senior Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Diversity Fellowship, and a Winterthur Museum and Library Fellowship.

A cultural historian who studies objects and the material work, Dr. Psyche is at work on a new research project that explores class, consumption, and citizenship by looking at African American domestic interiors from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century.

Dr. Psyche is a professor and department chair in the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland College Park. She is also an affiliate faculty member of the Theatre, Dance, and Performing Studies, the Departments of African American Studies, Anthropology, The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity. She holds a BA from the University of Virginia, and an MA and Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Maryland College Park."