“Foreigners from the Five Nations Enjoying a Banquet”, Utagawa Yoshikazu, 1861

Of all the subjects that global historians study, food is one of the most global. Without food, life is not sustainable, and this is true for humans, animals and plants, now as much as it was in the past. Yet the study of food history is by no means always studied in global context; often, the emphasis is on national or regional perspectives. This symposium focuses on the study of food across cultural, political and dietary boundaries.

At the joint Symposium on Global Food History by Leiden University and the Global History and Culture Center of Warwick University, global food historians and Asian food scholars will discuss how food and the global fit together as subjects of research. Various aspects, methods and ingredients will be explored, as well as the cultural and political implications of food and diet in several regions.

Symposium: Global Food History: Methodologies
Date: Monday November 28 2016, 13:45 – 18:00 hours
Venue: Leiden University, Verbarium room, Matthias de Vrieshof 3
After the lecture there will be drinks.
*  You are most welcome to attend after registration, through register @ sharedtaste.nl

13.45: Welcome and introductions, Anne Gerritsen
Anne Gerritsen holds the Kikkoman Chair for the study of Asia-Europe exchange and is working at the Shared Taste project, Leiden University.

13.45-14.25 Hyunhee Park : The Story of Soju: Distillation in Mongol Korea and its Eurasian Roots and Global Context
Huynhee Park is Associate Professor of History at the City University of New York, teaches courses about Chinese and global history, and is assistant editor to the academic journal Crossroads.

14.25-15.05 Rebecca Earle: Dietary imperialism in the 18th century
Rebecca Earle is Professor of History at the University of Warwick, specializing in the cultural history of Spanish America and early modern Europe, and recently working on the history of the potato.

15.05-15.45 Lizzie Collingham: Lost in translation? The journey of Indian food in the 19th century colonial world
Lizzie Collingham is Associate Fellow at the History Department at the University of Warwick, her well known history of Indian food ‘Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors’ has been translated into many languages.

15.45-16.10 coffee – tea break

16.10-16.50 Ching May Bo : Cake, Tart, and Turtle Soup: the flow of tastes and culinary skills from Europe to Canton in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries
Ching May Bo is Professor of History at the City University of Hong Kong and distinguished professor of the Pearl River Scholars at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou. She has published extensively on the social and cultural history of modern China.

16.50-17.30 Katarzyna Cwiertka: Packaging in Japan: the global, the local and the fallacious
Katarzyna Cwiertka is Professor of Japanstudies at Leiden University and a well known expert on the history of food of modern Japan and Korea, on which she has published extensively. She is founding editor of the new journal Global Food History.

17.30-18.00 Wrap up and comments, chaired by Anne Gerritsen
18.15 — drinks

This symposium is co-organised by the Shared Taste project at Leiden University and the Global History and Culture Centre at the University of Warwick.

• Image credit: “Foreigners from the Five Nations Enjoying a Banquet”. Triptych of polychrome woodblock prints; ink and color on paper. Utagawa Yoshikazu, 1861 Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of William S. Lieberman, 2005