Ongoing and Past Research Projects
The Bland Standard: Vanilla and American Life
My manuscript project examines the politics and social worlds of vanilla in the United States. Moving from the eighteenth century into the twenty-first, the book traces how vanilla, once extraordinarily rare ingredient, becomes synonymous with the bland and banal. Moreover, it looks behinds the facade of “plain vanilla” to uncover complex and contradictory ideas about class, race, gender and sexuality and demonstrate the subtle workings of normalized ideological power in the consumptive cultures of everyday American life.
A portion of this project was published in the peer-reviewed journal Food and Foodways in 2024 and awarded the 2025 Belasco Prize for Scholarly Excellence by the Association for the Study of Food and Society.
“Famous, Relatable, Cravings: Chrissy Teigen’s Culinary Self-Presentations”
What does it mean to translate the celebrity self across media? My Master’s thesis explored the multi-hyphenate, multiracial celebrity Chrissy Teigen’s relationships to food, identity, and media through her first two cookbooks Cravings and More Cravings.
“‘As American as Apple Pie’: The History of American Apple Pie and Its Development into a National Symbol”
My undergraduate thesis—or “SPROJ” (senior project) at Bard College—explores the place of apple pie in the American imaginary from the founding to the mid-twentieth century to argue that the expression “as American as apple pie” becomes most salient in moments of crafting a national identity on the national stage, especially in understanding the U.S. as separate from Western European nations in World War I.
This work was reimagined as an undergraduate material culture course at Boston University in Fall 2023 and Fall 2024.
