The Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin

is pleased to announce its 2016-17 theme, “Food and Drink in History”

Source of life, source of strife: food and drink are central to historical experience across time and cultures, whether in connection with the pleasures and terrors of everyday life or the long evolution of life on Earth.  As a window onto economies, societies, and civilizations, food and drink have a venerable historiographical lineage, including the Marxist tradition of E.P. Thompson’s classic work on grain riots and the moral economy of the English crowd and the Annales school publications that focused on material culture and long-term social structures.  As markers of social boundaries and identities, reflections of spiritual and moral values, and implements of ritual, food and drink hold critical symbolic and performative value in human history.  And as nutritional and psychoactive substances, food and drink are central to the history of public health and human emotions.  Drawing on diverse disciplines and methodologies, food studies has fueled in recent years a vast popular and scholarly interest in the histories of culinary practices, nutrition and health, global economic development and food security, animal rights, and agro-environmental change.  For its 2016-2017 annual fellowship theme, the Institute for Historical Studies welcomes proposals from historical-minded scholars of all eras and geographic regions that provide new perspectives on the cultural, social, economic, political, environmental, diplomatic, military, medicinal, scientific, and technological histories of food and drink.

The IHS invites applications for resident fellows at all ranks. Deadline: Friday, January 15, 2016 (12:00 midnight CST). For more information about the institute’s fellowship and application process, please visit:

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/historicalstudies/fellowships/resident-fellows.php[utexas.edu]