Topics vary by semester
Professor(s)
Notes
This course uses food as an entry point into investigating identity formation and environmental management over space and time in the Atlantic World.
The Atlantic is a heterogenous space of different environments, peoples, and cultures between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Yet, historians and anthropologists have proposed considering the “Atlantic theater” as a research category for understanding human mobility and environmental change in a region collectively shaped by diasporas of people, plants, and pathogens since c. 1500.
The course is led by a historian (Rosengarten) and a biodiversity scientist (Caballer Gutierrez); each week of the first semester students will think about one crop, dish, or food culture that plays a prominent role in Atlantic history. We will contextualize these items both historically and ecologically as we move around the ocean.
Our weekly case studies include questions such as: what could a Viking arriving in 10th-century Iceland eat and cultivate in volcanic soils? Where can sugarcane grow, and how did sugar production move from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic to drive the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the 15th century? How does the history of the peanut industry in Senegal explain Senegalese national dishes and 19th-century French imperial expansion? What are the consequences of crude oil runoff in the Niger Delta region for Nigerian populations that do not consent to ingesting it, but are nonetheless exposed to this toxicity by today’s Big Oil industries?
Food and crop histories show us how the Atlantic world of uneven geopolitical relationships was forged in modern history. At the same time, they provide insight into the present and futures of climate change and uneven environmental degradation for communities around the world. Throughout our Atlantic itinerary, we ask: do food and consumption practices mirror or obscure our historically shifting identities?
Learning Outcomes
- Information Literacy: Students will comprehend how information is produced and valued in order to discover, evaluate, use, and create information and knowledge effectively and ethically. In FirstBridge, students will demonstrate the conversational nature of scholarship, and recognize their potential role and responsibilities as contributors to that conversation. For each discipline taught in FirstBridge, students will identify reference works, journals, databases and/or major works in history, in order to start effective research in the field (FB LO1)
- Life at University: Students will acquire the study skills, time management, and interpersonal skills needed to meet the demands of university-level academic work at a Liberal Arts College individually or as a team. Students will value the multiple meanings of place through experiential learning at AUP and beyond in the Parisian or global context (FB LO2)
Syllabus
Schedule
Day | Start Time | End Time | Room |
---|---|---|---|
Tuesday | 13:45 | 15:05 | C-102 |
Friday | 13:45 | 15:05 | C-102 |
Wednesday | 13:45 | 16:40 | Q-604 |