Description

During the last two decades the position of food history has shifted from the periphery to the centre of the academic interests. It has become a respectable source of knowledge about how and why societies have changed over time. In this lecture, Katarzyna Cwiertka will look back at her own contribution to the study of culinary culture of modern Japan and Korea, drawing on her two monographs – Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity (Reaktion Books 2006) and Cuisine, Colonialism and Cold War: Food in Twentieth Century Korea (Reaktion Books 2012). She will also briefly introduce the material from her forthcoming volume Food and War in Mid-Twentieth-Century East Asia (Ashgate 2013). While illuminating the importance of studying food in its own right, as a domain of culture, the lecture will focus on the wide-ranging possibilities that research on food offers as a window into historical inquiry that extends beyond the realm of cuisine and nutrition.

Katarzyna J. Cwiertka is Professor and Chair of Modern Japan Studies at Leiden University, the Netherlands. In her scholarship to date, she has utilized food as a vehicle to talk about social change in modern East Asia, and explored global interconnectivity expressed through food and facilitated by colonialism, war and cultural imperialism.