Fire and Freedom: A Conversation with Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson

Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson, Associate Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Maryland College Park and Guest Curator of Fire and Freedom, will lead a conversation about how we can learn the ways that meals transcended taste and sustenance in early America by observing the labor of slaves at George Washington’s Mt. Vernon.
About Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson

Psyche Williams-Forson is associate professor and chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland College Park, and an affiliate faculty member of the women’s studies and African American studies departments and the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity. She is co-editor (with Carole Counihan) of Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World (Routledge 2011) and author of Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Her research focuses on the ways in which race, gender, class, and region affect food security/insecurity among African Americans. She also uses her training in material culture and museum scholarship in her research and teaching to explain the complexities of food and culture.