Dr Neha Vermani

In May 2021, I was invited as a guest lecturer to devise a module for the “Cooking with Shakespeare” undergraduate course, offered by Emory College of Arts and Science. My teaching module, ‘Reading Early-modern Cookbooks’, delineated the ways in which culinary manuals can analysed for understanding the history of domestic spaces, gender, labour, material objects, technology, and colonialism. In January 2021, I collaborated with the co-directors and fellow postdoctoral researchers on Folger’s Before Farm to Table project to design and conduct an interdisciplinary undergraduate course, “Before Farm to Table: An Investigation of Foodways with the Folger Shakespeare Library”, at Amherst College. I also taught the ‘Global Foodways in the Early-modern Period’ and ‘Authenticity and Food’ modules of the course. The first module engaged with the movement of vegetables, animals, people, and culinary and pharmacological knowledge across the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean worlds, and the history of exploitative colonial onslaught that followed. The second module focused on analysing and problematising the notion authenticity, particularly in the context of non-western cuisines, by moving the needle away from the search for a rigid and fixed grammar of ‘traditional’ cuisines. From September to November 2019, I delivered guest seminars on the themes of early-modern consumption practices at the History Departments of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi University, and Shiv Nadar University in India.