WGS/BU's first Lunch Discussion of 2016/2017 will feature WGS/BU Visiting Scholar, Diana Garvin, discussing her project focused on East African women’s domestic labor in Fascist-period Italy, "Black Milk: Colonial Foodways and Intimate Imperialism"; and Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellow at WGS/BU, Vrinda Varma, discussing her research on the "Construction of Women’s Identities and Food Narratives" in Kerala, India.
The luncheon discussion, sponsored by WGS and hosted at the Center for Gender, Sexuality & Activism, will take place from noon till 1:30 on September 21st. This event is co-sponsored by GaIDI (Gender & International Development Initiatives) of the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. Event flyer here.
About the speakers (Source: WGS/BU):
Diana Garvin has her PhD in Romance Studies from Cornell University. Her previous work examined the transnational history of Fascism across Italy and Italian East Africa (modern-day Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia) through Gender Studies and Critical Race Studies. In particular, she used food as a lens to examine the daily negotiation of power between East African women and the Italian state, demonstrating how bids for nutrition and taste speak to broader questions of gendered forms of labor, the social construction of race and racism, and what is at stake in the struggle for control over food production and consumption. 
Vrinda Varma is a Doctoral Fellow at Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kerala, India, and an Assistant Professor of English at Sree Kerala Varma College, Thrissur, Kerala. Vrinda is currently working on her doctoral dissertation that studies the construction of women’s identities in relation to food narratives. Her work is primarily focused in her home state of Kerala, where she examines how narratives of food (de)construct, maintain and perpetuate gendered identities for women. Her areas of interest include Food and Food Culture, Food and Gender Roles, Food History, Culinary Writing, and Magazines and Readership.
Painting by Raja Ravi Varma, "There Comes Papa" (1893)
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
