Jennie Youssef

2025-26 Long-term Fellow

Much Depends on Dinner: Early Modern Foodways, Performance, and Dramatic Representation

My project brings together the fields of early modern, food history, theatre and performance, and race studies in an interdisciplinary approach to the study of literature and drama in which foodways “perform” in a process of colonial categorization that is still relevant in contemporary politics of identity and race.

Drawing on archival material in English, Arabic, and Spanish, I investigate three key examples—couscous, strawberries, and bacalhau (salt cod)—to illuminate how food-related practices were markers through which identity was produced, transformed, and erased, on and beyond the stage, in England, Spain, and the transatlantic.

Through these three case studies, I demonstrate that the historical contextualization of foodways offers a wider cultural and period-specific understanding of theatrical and performative allusions to them as part of the systematic colonial process of taxonomizing people—a process that reverberates in the social hierarchies throughout the contemporary world.