Editors:
Amanda E. Herbert, Durham University
Amanda Herbert is a historian of the body: gender and sexuality, health and wellness, food and drink. She earned her Ph.D. in History from the Johns Hopkins University. Her first book, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain was published by Yale University Press in 2014, and she is at work on her second, Spa Medicine and Body Politics in the British Atlantic. She served as co-director of the $1.5 million Mellon initiative in collaborative research at the Folger Institute, Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures, and co-curated the 2019 Folger exhibition First Chefs: Fame and Foodways from Britain to the Americas. She is interested in the history of leftovers. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaeherbert.
R.A. Kashanipour, University of Arizona.
Ryan Kashanipour is an anthropologist and historian of medicine and science in Latin America with particular interests in plants, foods, and recipes. He holds masters and doctoral degrees in Library Science and History and is currently completing a book on early modern medial recipes book called Between Magic and Medicine: Colonial Yucatec Healing and the Spanish Atlantic World, which explores sickness and healing in colonial Yucatán and the production of medical knowledge in the Enlightenment-era Spanish Atlantic.
In addition to writing and editing with the Recipes Project, Ryan collaborates with the Southwest Seminar and the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, edits Medieval and Renaissance Latin America and co-edits New Colonialisms in Latin America with Routledge Press, and mentors Mellon fellows with the Council on Library Information Resources. He is obsessed with all things chile and chocolate.
Sarah Peters Kernan, Independent Scholar
Sarah Peters Kernan is an independent culinary historian. She holds a PhD in medieval history from The Ohio State University. She is currently working on a monograph about the production and use of cookbooks in medieval and early modern England and is also working to create an edition of a seventeenth-century recipe book she transcribed and researched as a Food Studies Fellow at the New York Public Library. She has published in the journal Food & History and has contributed to the Recipes Project for several years.
Sarah has been especially active as a public historian, working with institutions and organizations like The Met Cloisters, Manuscript Cookbooks Survey, and the Culinary Historians of Chicago. She collaborates frequently with the Newberry Library, assembling modules on food history topics for Digital Collections for the Classroom, teaching Adult Seminars on food history topics, and developing culinary history programming.
Joshua Schlachet, University of Arizona
Joshua Schlachet is a historian of early modern and modern Japan, specializing in the cultural history of food and nourishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His current project, “Nourishing Life: Diet, Body, and Society in Early Modern Japan,” examines the emergence of a dietary “common knowledge” as new practical guidebooks circulating among ordinary readers expanded the concept of a well-nourished body to encompass economic productivity, status hierarchy, and moral cultivation. Josh received his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and teaches courses on Japanese and East Asian history, dietary cultures, and everyday life at U of A.
Jess Clark, Brock University
Jess Clark is a historian of women and gender in modern Britain. She has published on the history of beauty in nineteenth-century Britain, charting the role of British beauty ‘experts’ in shaping dominant ideas about appearance, race, and class. Her first book, The Business of Beauty: Gender and the Body in Modern London (Bloomsbury, 2020) analyzes the role of London-based entrepreneurs in developing a national beauty culture. She’s now writing a book on the history of smell, nationalism, belonging, and exclusion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She occasionally tweets at @JessicaPClark.
Melissa Reynolds, The University of Pennsylvania
Melissa Reynolds is a cultural historian of medieval and early modern Europe with broad research interests in the history of material texts, the history of gender and the body, and the history of medicine and science. She is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center and a Lecturer in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. Formerly, she taught at Rutgers and was a member of the Princeton Society of Fellows. Her first book, Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print, will be published in Fall 2024 with the University of Chicago Press. She’s now working on a book on changing practices of “reading” the human body in the transformation period between 1450 and 1650. Her research has appeared in the Journal of British Studies, Social History of Medicine, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, and the Washington Post, and her translations and transcriptions feature on the Making and Knowing Project. You can follow her on Twitter and Threads @melkatrey.
Previous Editors:
Elaine Leong
Elaine Leong founded the Recipes Project blog with Lisa Smith in 2012 and served as editor from 2012 to 2020.
Elaine is lecturer in History at University College London. Her research is centered upon medical and scientific knowledge transfer and production with a focus on issues of gender. Her interdisciplinary projects use theories and methods in the history of the book and the history of reading to elucidate practical knowledge and quotidian activities within the domestic sphere. From 2012-2019, she led the ‘Reading and Writing Nature in Early Modern Europe’ research group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. Her first book Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science and the Household in Early Modern England was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018 and won the History of Science Society’s Margaret W. Rossiter Prize in 2019. Elaine is currently working on her second book project Reading Rivière in Early Modern England and Wellcome Trust funded project titled “Technologies of Health c. 1450-1750”. She occasionally tweets as @HistoryElaine.
Lisa Smith
Lisa Smith founded the Recipes Project blog with Elaine Leong in 2012 and served as editor from 2012 to 2022.
A historian of gender and medicine in eighteenth-century France and England, Lisa Smith (Lecturer in Digital History, University of Essex) has published widely on leaky bodies, pain, fertility, and the household. She is finishing a book on “Domestic Medicine: Gender, Health and the Household in Eighteenth Century England and France”. In addition to developing an online database of the Sir Hans Sloane Correspondence, she is a co-investigator on a crowd-sourcing recipes transcription project. She blogs at The Sloane Letters Blog and Wonders & Marvels and tweets as @historybeagle.
Laurence Totelin, University of Cardiff
Laurence Totelin is a historian of Greek and Roman Science, Technology and Medicine. She focuses on the history of pharmacology and botany. Her work is influenced by gender theory, and she has a particular interest in gynaecological treatments, aphrodisiacs, and the properties of milk (especially breast-milk).
She has published both on the history of ancient pharmacology (in particular on gynaecological pharmacology) and the history of botany. Currently she is interested in the ancient history of milk, with a focus on its symbolism in ancient cultures. She is an experienced blogger, writing posts for the Recipes Project, her own blog Concocting History, and guest posts on other blogs.
Laura Mitchell, University of Saskatchewan and St. Thomas More College
Laura Mitchell trained as a medievalist at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto. Her main area of research focus was on charms and other forms of folk magic in later medieval England. Her research interests also include book history, manuscript culture, books of secrets and recipe collections, and their transmission. Laura is currently a project coordinator at the University of Toronto working on a series of digital projects on Matthew Parker’s Manuscripts and Printed Books and John Stow’s Medieval Books. Laura manages the Facebook page and Twitter for The Recipes Project. She sometimes tweets about medieval things @medieval_laura.
Miles Wilkerson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Miles Wilkerson is a graduate student in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His broader research focuses on what contemporary observers call “disability” in the Atlantic African diaspora in the early modern period. At the moment, his research and writing interrogates how debility impacted the value of the enslaved in British North America during the 18th century. He is a graduate representative on the Disability History Association’s (dishist.org) executive board. You can follow him on Twitter at @mm_wilkerson.
Clare Gordon Bettencourt, University of California, Irvine
Clare Gordon Bettencourt completed her PhD in History at UCI. Her dissertation, “Bread and Butter Policy: America’s Food Identity Standards, 1938-2018” traces the framing, enforcement, and impact of food identity standards, a body of pure food regulations created and enforced by the Food and Drug Administration. Her work appears in the edited volume Proteins, Pathologies and Politics: Dietary Innovation and Disease from the Nineteenth Century. She has served as a Food Fellow for the University of California’s Global Food Initiative, and was a Pedagogical Fellow with UCI’s Division of Teaching Excellence. You can find her on Twitter @dearclare.
Previous Administrative Assistants:
- Chiara Leon Briones, University of Essex
- Chelsea Clark, University of Saskatchewan
- Julia Jaegle, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
- Erin Spinney, University of Saskatchewan
- Juliette Carbonnier, Princeton University
Questions or comments? Email the editorial team at recipesproject@brocku.ca.