Cultural “Other” in Colonial New England: The Duality of Maize
By Dr. Karen Bescherer Metheny
Tuesday, February 24 at 2:00 PM
808 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 109
Karen Bescherer Metheny, PhD, is a Lecturer for the Gastronomy Program, Metropolitan College, Boston University and Visiting Researcher in the Department of Archaeology at Boston University. She is senior editor of Archaeology of Food: An Encyclopedia (July 2015, with Mary C. Beaudry) and author of “Modeling Communities through Food and Commensality: Connecting the Daily Meal to the Construction of Place and Identity” (2014) and From the Miners’ Doublehouse: Archaeology and Landscape in a Pennsylvania Coal Company Town (2007). Dr. Metheny teaches courses in the anthropology and archaeology of food, food history and foodways of New England, and method and theory in food studies. In this presentation, she will discuss her research into the cultural significance of maize in colonial New England, and what its consumption reveals about cultural identity and encounters with “cultural other.”