Applications for Postdoctoral Fellows for 2025-2026 are open.
Applications for Faculty and Graduate Fellows for 2025-2026 are open.
How do we study that which is missing?
The 2025-26 Seminar at the Center for Cultural Analysis grapples with this question by interrogating hunger in the past and present. Food studies scholarship has a rich literature on culinary practices, commodities, food production, and the cultural representation of food. Far more meager are studies that contend with the absence of food at the individual or collective level. Scholars now recognize that hunger is a product of cultural understanding, changing across place and time, such that victims of famine, for example, might still hesitate to eat food that falls outside their cultural proscriptions. Hunger is at once a very personal experience, a biological imperative felt in the body, and a collective struggle felt by whole communities. In the face of such complexities, the study of hunger has often been left to doctors and scientists rather than humanists. In the words of the historians Sara Millman and Robert W. Kates, “the history of hunger is for the most part unwritten. The hungry rarely write history, and historians are rarely hungry.”
Hunger is an urgent political and humanitarian challenge around the globe, and the academy can no longer afford to ignore these spaces of absence. In the twenty-first century, hunger is an outcome of climate change and natural disaster, war and genocide, poverty, inequality, and protest (as in hunger strikes). It is an everyday reality for communities like Rutgers-New Brunswick, where 1 in 3 undergraduate or graduate students is food insecure, and the broader New Brunswick community, where 1 in 3 people live below the poverty line. Hunger is also a global historical phenomenon, with a rich interdisciplinary scholarship that must be brought to bear on our contemporary crisis. We may see in the past not just the trauma of hunger as expressed by survivors, poets, artists, and critics, but also the deliberate use of hunger by political and economic powers to control others. By its nature hunger is interdisciplinary, caused by the convergence of historical, social, economic, political, cultural, and other changes. The gnawing pangs of hunger echo across the centuries, and we may find parallels, causes, and potential solutions as we cast a wide net in studying hunger as a persistent feature of the human experience.
Led by two food studies scholars, Jack Bouchard (History) and Carla Cevasco (American Studies), the 2025-6 CCA Interdisciplinary Research Seminar will consider hunger from all of these angles, and more, potentially drawing participants from the humanities (history, literature, etc.), social sciences (anthropology, sociology, etc.), SEBS (including Food Science, Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program, Rutgers Against Hunger initiative, and Family and Community Health Services), and RBHS. In addition to the discussion of traditional scholarship, we will use the seminar as an opportunity for community-engaged scholarship and field visits, with potential partners including the Native American garden project at Rutgers Gardens, Rutgers Against Hunger, co-LAB Arts, Elijah’s Promise, and other on- and off-campus entities. Over the course of the year, we aim to investigate hunger in the past and the present, and to give a new generation of food studies scholars an opportunity to pursue and discuss their own research.
2025-26 Seminar - Hunger
Directed by Jack Bouchard and Carla Cevasco
2025/2026 SEMINAR LEADERS
