Kimberly Wallace-Sanders
OXFORD, Miss. – The Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies and the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi have teamed up for a lecture and graduate student symposium examining the relationships between women, work and food.
The sessions, set for Sept. 12 and 13, are free and open to the public.
The 18th annual Lucy Somerville Howorth Lecture begins at 7 p.m. Sept. 12 in the Barnard Observatory Tupelo Room. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University, will address “Dishing up Dixie in the ‘Post-Racial’ South.” She is the author of “Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender and Southern Memory.” Co-sponsors of the event are the UM departments of African-American Studies, English, history and sociology and anthropology.
“When we learned that the Southern Foodways Alliance was planning its annual symposium around women and work this coming October, we thought this would be a great opportunity to work together on a related venture as a way to build a continuing dialogue,” said Theresa Starkey, assistant director of the Isom Center.
“Knowing that there was really great research being produced by M.A. and Ph.D. students on this topic, we decided to create a forum that would build on our annual lecture and provide a day for young scholars and our campus and broader community to reflect on the many ways in which food and women and their labor intertwines, ” said Susan Grayzel, professor of history and director of the center.
The Sept. 13 symposium of panel discussions begins at 9 a.m. in the Yerby Center. Topics include “Talking with Our Mouths Full: Women, Food and Oral Histories,” “Consumption, Production and Restaurant Culture,” “Nutrition and Activism” and “Reading and Representing the Southern Kitchen.”
Plenary speakers include Megan Abbott, Grisham writer-in-residence, discussing “Mildred Pierce.” Desirée Hensley and Allison Korn, both from the UM law school’s Civil Legal Clinic, will address fishing, farming and female self-sufficiency in the Mississippi Delta as an issue of political and civil rights.
For a list of conferences times and panel titles, visit the Sarah Isom Center’s website at http://sarahisomcenter.org/2013/08/08/sfaisom-center-graduate-symposium-on-women-work-and-food-preliminary-schedule/.