Notes on Contributors
- Notes on Contributors
Emily J. H. Contois is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa. Her research explores the connections between food, the body, health, and identities in the everyday American experience and popular culture and has been published in Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, and Feminist Media Studies, among others.
Kera Lovell is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Utah, Asia Campus, where she teaches courses on U.S. history and global studies. Lovell earned her Ph.D. in American Studies at Purdue University in 2017. She has taught courses at Purdue University, Ball State University, and the University of Hawai'i. Her book project, titled, The People's Park: Work, the Body, and the Environment in Radical Postwar Placemaking, traces an undocumented method of late-Cold War era urban protest in which activists challenged police brutality and urban renewal by insurgently converting vacant lots into parks.
Elissa Underwood Marek completed her PhD in American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin in 2017. Her research interests include critical prison studies, food injustice, and urban policy. She is currently working on a book manuscript focusing on how people who are directly affected by carceral policies and practices use food as a method of resistance and a tool to effect change. Elissa is also an attorney and social justice advocate who is involved with community organizing and activism around issues affecting incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people.
Stephanie Marek Muller is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Communication Studies at Ball State University. She received her PhD from the University of Utah in 2018. Her research foci include rhetorical theory and criticism, environmental communication, critical-cultural communication studies, and critical animal studies.
Lauren Rabinovitz is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Iowa. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including: Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity (2012), For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (1998), and Points of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema, 1943-71, 2nd edition (2003). She has been teaching undergraduate and graduate American Studies courses on food since 2007.
Sarah Robbins is Lorraine Sherley Professor of Literature in the English Department at Texas Christian University, where she is also a program affiliate in the Women and Gender Studies program and the new department of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies. Her books include Managing Literacy, Mothering America; The Cambridge Introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe; and Nellie Arnott's Writings on Angola, 1905-1913, as well as several co-edited collections focused on teaching and community engagement. Her most recent monograph, Learning Legacies: Archive to Action through Women's Cross-Cultural Teaching, employs a mixed-method approach blending archival research with autoethnography, literary analysis, and extensive interviewing.
Tashima Thomas is a gastronome, cultural critic, and art historian specializing in the art of the African diaspora in the Americas. Her work focuses on food pathways, materiality, commodity fetishism, and the consumption of culture. She is currently a lecturer at Pratt Institute and CUNY Bronx Community College.
Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American literature and creative writing. Her new book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press, 2018), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her work has been published in Food and Foodways, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.
Stephanie Tsank is a visiting assistant professor of English at the University of Iowa, where she teaches courses in realism and literary food studies. She is currently working on a book project that traces how realist writers from Stephen Crane to Willa Cather use food to represent immigrant characters. Her writings have previously appeared in the Willa Cather Review and Southern Literary Journal.
