As the new academic year begins, the Recipes Project would like to celebrate the accomplishments of our contributors from this most unusual past year. Our community has been busy completing PhDs, publishing, securing new fellowships, enjoying promotions, and more. We heartily congratulate all of you for your successes! We also wish to congratulate and encourage the many contributors who are teaching, researching, and writing in extraordinary circumstances, often at home while negotiating the schedules and needs of several others in the household. This, too, is noble work worthy of much acknowledgement and praise. We invite contributors to share your news anytime with the Recipes Project community on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
Agnese Benzonelli completed a PhD in Archaeological science at the UCL Institute of Archaeology in February 2020. Her thesis, “Technological traditions and trajectories in the production of black bronze alloys,” was competed under the supervision of Ian Freestone and Marcos Martinón-Torres. Agnese continues to work at the same institution as Technician in Archaeomaterials Preparation and Analysis, a position she has held since 2015.
Clare Gordon Bettencourt has served as Editorial Assistant for the Journal of Asian Studies since summer 2019 while continuing her role as a Social Media Editor for the Recipes Project. She co-authored an article with Yong Chen on the effects of COVID-19 on dining in the U.S. and China (forthcoming in the Journal of Asian Studies). Clare also recently completed drafts of all her dissertation chapters.
Claire Burridge recently completed her PhD, “An interdisciplinary investigation into Carolingian medical knowledge and practice,” at the University of Cambridge. She began a postdoctoral fellowship at the British School at Rome (BSR) in 2019 on the project “The Movement of Early Medieval Medical Knowledge: Exchange in the Italian Peninsula.” Although the fellowship has been temporarily paused due to the pandemic, Claire will be returning to the BSR this fall to complete it. She was also recently awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship for my project “Crossroads: The Evolution of Early Medieval Medicine in Global & Local Contexts” at the University of Sheffield. She will begin in spring 2021 after completing her time in Rome. Finally, Claire published her first article this year: “Incense in medicine: An early medieval perspective,” Early Medieval Europe 28, no. 2 (May 2020): 219–255.
Nadja Durbach published a book, Many Mouths: The Politics of Food in Britain From the Workhouse to the Welfare State (Cambridge University Press, 2020). She also published several articles: “Keeping Kosher in the Camp: Feeding Interned British Jews During the First World War,” Immigrants & Minorities, (published online August 2020); “Dead or Alive?: Stillbirth Registration, Premature Babies, and the Definition of Life in England and Wales, 1836-1960,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 94(1) 2020; “Atypical Bodies: The Cultural Work of the Victorian Freak Show,” in Joyce Huff and Martha Stoddard Holmes (eds.), A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury Press, 2020); “Comforts, Clubs, and the Casino: Food and the Perpetuation of the British Class System in First World War Civilian Internment Camps,” Journal of Social History, 52(3) (2019).
Sietske Fransen started a research group at the Bibliotheca Hertziana-Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome in 2019. The group is on “Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions.”
Thijs Hagendijk successfully defended his dissertation in 2020. “Reworking Recipes. Reading and Writing Practical Texts in the Early Modern Arts” is about reading and writing practices in the early modern arts, with a specific focus on text usage in historical glassmaking, painting, and metalworking. He also co-authored an article with Márcia Vilarigues and Sven Dupré: “Materials, Furnaces, and Texts. How to Write about Making Glass Colours in the Seventeenth Century,” Ambix 67 (forthcoming fall 2020). Thijs is a lecturer at Utrecht University and member of the ERC-funded ARTECHNE project “Technique in the Arts: Concepts, Practices, Expertise, 1500–1950.”
Sarah Peters Kernan is a 2020–2021 Scholar-in-Residence at the Newberry Library. She wrote “Recent Trends in Food History Research in the United States: 2017–2020,” Food & History 18:1–2 (forthcoming 2020). Sarah has also been co-organizing a virtual conference on Food and the Book: 1300–1800 with David Goldstein and Allen Grieco to take place in October 2020. The conference is co-sponsored by the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library and the Folger Institute’s collaborative research project, Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Diana Luft published Medieval Welsh Medical Texts Volume 1: The Recipes (University of Wales Press, 2020). The book is an edition and translation of the Welsh-language medical recipe collections in four late fourteenth-century manuscripts, the earliest medical texts to appear in the language. The research work for the book was funded by a Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship which Diana held from 2015–2019. The book is available in an open access format, funded by the Wellcome Trust, and can also be purchased.
Eveline Szarka received her PhD in July 2020 from the University of Zurich. In her dissertation, she analyzed the impact of the Swiss Protestant Reformation on the belief in ghosts and spirits from 1570–1730. In 2020, she was granted a scholarship from the Swiss National Science Foundation to visit Harvard University and University College London from 2021–2022 as a postdoctoral fellow. Her current project focuses on handbooks about magic tricks and life hacks as related to the history of knowledge and science (1650–1850).
If you’d like to feature a project, scholar, or institution on Around the Table, please email Sarah Kernan.
