Drew Gilpin Faust took office as Harvard’s 28th president on July 1, 2007. Faust, a historian of the Civil War and the American South, is also the Lincoln Professor of History in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Previously she had served as founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a post she took up on Jan. 1, 2001. See full biography

Julia Abramson is an associate professor of French at the University of Oklahoma, where she teaches and directs research in French literature and cultural history of the Classical era and the Enlightenment, contemporary civilisation, and interdisciplinary topics in food and culture. Her research examines topics at the intersections of history, literature, and culture. She is the author of Food Culture in France (Greenwood Press, 2006), Learning from Lying: Paradoxes of the Literary Mystification (University of Delaware Press, 2005), and articles on western European gastronomic traditions and their representations, including “Deciphering La Vraye mettode de biend trencher les viandes (1926)” in Authenticity: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery (2006), “Legitimacy and Nationalism in the Almanach des gourmands (1803–1812)” in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (2003), and “Grimod’s Debt to Mercier and the Emergence of Gastronomic Writing Reconsidered,” in EMF: Studies in Early Modern France (2001). Abramson earned her BA in French studies from Bryn Mawr College and PhD in Romance languages and literatures from Princeton University.

Marylène Altieri is curator of books and printed materials at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. Altieri received her bachelor’s degree in medieval and modern European history at the University of York, England, and a master’s in history from Harvard University. She later earned a master’s degree in library and information science from Simmons College.

Warren Belasco is a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. He is the author of Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food (University of California Press, 2006), Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry (Pantheon Books, 1989; Cornell University Press, 1993, 2007), and Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910–1945 (MIT Press, 1979). He coedited Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies (Routledge, 2002) and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America (Oxford University Press, 2004). He is chief editor of Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research.

Amy Bentley is an associate professor and the interim chair in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University. A historian with interests in the social, historical, and cultural contexts of food, she is the author of Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (University of Illinois Press, 1998), as well as several articles on such diverse topics as the politics of southwestern cuisine, a historiography of food riots, and the cultural implications of the Atkins diet. She is currently working on two book-length projects, a history of food in the United States since World War II and a cultural history of baby food. Bentley is a member of the Association for the Study of Food and Society, which she served as president from 2000 to 2002. She also serves on the editorial boards for the journals Food and Foodways: Explorations in the History and Culture of Human Nourishment and Food, Culture and Society.

Vincent Brown is a multimedia historian with a keen interest in the political implications of cultural practice. Brown teaches courses at Harvard in early American history, African diaspora studies, and the history of slavery. He was a 2005–2006 Radcliffe Institute fellow. He is the author of The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (forthcoming, Harvard University Press) and producer of an audiovisual documentary titled Herskovits: A Jew at the Heart of Blackness.

Joan Jacobs Brumberg is the Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and Professor Emerita at Cornell University, where she held a unique interdisciplinary appointment in history, human development, and gender studies for more than 25 years. She is the author of Kansas Charley: The Story of a Nineteenth-Century Boy Murderer (Viking, 2003), a story of adolescent boys and violence in 19th century America which was used in the campaign against the juvenile death penalty; The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (Random House, 1997); and the prize-winning book Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa As a Modern Disease (Harvard University Press, 1988). In 2005, The Body Project inspired a play at Horizons Theatre in Washington, DC, the oldest feminist theatre company in North America. Brumberg also wrote the introduction for both of Lauren Greenfield’s books of photography: Girl Culture (Chronicle Books, 2002) and Thin (Chronicle Books, 2006), the book that accompanied the recent HBO documentary of the same name. In addition to being a fellow of the Society of American Historians, Brumberg has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony.

Mayra Buvinic is sector director for gender and development, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network, World Bank. Between 1996 and 2004, she was division chief for social development at the Inter American Development Bank (IDB), where she oversaw work on the social sectors, including health, urban development, labor markets, early childhood development, social inclusion and violence preventions, and both the Women in Development Unit and the Indigenous Peoples Unit. Prior to working at the IDB, Buvinic was a founding member and president of the International Center for Research on Women. She is past president of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) and member of a number of nonprofit boards, including the International Water Rights Management Institute, Sri Lanka, and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Nigeria. A Chilean national, her published works are in the areas of gender, poverty, and development; health and reproductive health; aggression and violence prevention; social inclusion and cohesion; and project and program evaluations. She holds a PhD in social psychology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Judith Carney is a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles. She is the author of Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Harvard University Press, 2001), which received the Melville J. Herskovits book award from the African Studies Association and the James M. Blaut publication award of the Association of American Geographers. Carney is the recipient of a 2005 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She has also received an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship and was selected as a Rockefeller Foundation scholar at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center. She is currently completing a book on African botanical contributions to the Americas.

Carole Counihan is a professor of anthropology and former director of women’s studies at Millersville University, in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. She has a BA in history from Stanford University and a PhD in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Counihan’s research interests center on food, ethnography, gender, and identity. She has collected food-centered life histories in Florence, Italy, and, since 1996, in an Hispanic community in southern Colorado. Counihan is the author of Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence (Routledge, 2004) and The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power (Routledge, 1999). She is editor of Food in the USA: A Reader (Routledge, 2002) and, with Penny Van Esterik, Food and Culture: A Reader (Routledge, 1997). She is coeditor of the scholarly journal Food and Foodways and is on the editorial board of Slow, the magazine of the International Slow Food Movement. Counihan is a visiting professor at the University of Gastronomic Sciences Masters Program in Colorno, Italy. She received a 2005–2006 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for her book manuscript “Women’s Stories of Food, Identity, and Land in the San Luis Valley of Colorado.”

Susanne Freidberg is the author of French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age (Oxford University Press, 2004). She has also written about food trade, culture, and regulation for the Washington Post and several journals. Currently an associate professor of geography at Dartmouth College and a nonresidential fellow at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University, she has received fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. She was also a 2000–2001 Radcliffe Institute fellow.

Barbara Haber is the former curator of books at the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library, where she developed a distinguished culinary collection. While there, Haber helped make the history of food and cooking a respected interdisciplinary subject, and she provided outreach programs designed to appeal to the professional food community. In recent years, Haber has served on the board of the International Association of Culinary Professionals and on the advisory boards of the University of California’s Food and Culture series and its journal, Gastronomica. She was senior advisory editor for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America (Oxford University Press, 2004). She presently serves on the James Beard Foundation’s Awards Committee and its Education Committee, and she was elected to its Who’s Who in Food and Beverage in America in 1997. Haber is the author of From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals (Free Press, 2002) and other books and articles, and she frequently speaks around the country on topics related to food and culture. Haber is a recipient of the M. F. K. Fisher Award given by Les Dames d’Escoffier International.

Jessica B. Harris is the author of 10 critically acclaimed cookbooks documenting the culture and foodways of the African diaspora. She has lectured internationally at museums, colleges, and conferences on the topic and contributes often to both scholarly and popular publications. Her current research centers on the history of the foodways and culture of African Americans within the continental United States, and she is working on a narrative history of African Americans and food, to be published in 2008 by Bloomsbury Press. Harris, who earned her doctoral degree from New York University, is a professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York.

Sucheta Mazumdar is an associate professor of history at Duke University. She teaches broad survey courses ranging from Chinese antiquity to the modern period, as well as courses on comparative Asian history and Asian American history. Two broad questions shape her research: the development of global capital and the commodities world market from the 18th century onward and the ways in which local gendered and racialized social formations intersect with migration and international capital flows to the Americas. Her first book, Sugar and Society in China: Peasants, Technology, and the World Market (Harvard University Asia Center, 1998), explored the Chinese history of a global commodity. She coedited Antinomies of Modernity: Essays on Race, Orient, Nation (Duke University Press, 2003) and wrote the introduction to Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and About Asian American Women (Beacon Press, 1989). Her current project, “From the Slave Trade to the Opium War: The China-America Trade,” brings together her research interests to reframe Atlantic-Pacific global history. A longer-term project, Global Connections: Women in the Making of the Modern World, is forthcoming from Norton.

Sidney W. Mintz is a research professor in anthropology at Johns Hopkins University who has done fieldwork in Haiti, Hong Kong, Iran, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. He earned a BA in anthropology from Brooklyn College and a PhD from Columbia University. During his long career, he has taught internationally at many distinguished universities. His publications include Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions in Eating, Culture, and the Past (Beacon Press, 1996), The Birth of African American Culture (Beacon Press, 1992, with R. Price), Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Viking, 1985), Caribbean Transformations (Aldine Publishing Company, 1974), Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History (Yale University Press, 1960), and The People of Puerto Rico: A Study in Social Anthropology (University of Illinois Press, 1956, with others).

Martha Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, appointed in philosophy, law, and divinity. She is an associate in political science and classics, a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a board member of the Human Rights Program. This spring she is a visiting professor of law and classics, Sidley Austin Visiting Professor of Law, and Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Visiting Professor at Radcliffe at Harvard University. Her most recent book is Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (The Belknap Press, 2006). Her new book, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in May.

Molly O’Neill was a reporter with the New York Times for ten years and the food columnist for its Sunday magazine. She is the author of three cookbooks, including the best-selling New York Cookbook (Workman Publishing, 1992), and hosted the PBS series “Great Food.” O’Neill won the prestigious Julia Child/IACP Award for cookbooks and James Beard Awards for books, journalism, and television, as well as for lifetime achievement. She is the only food writer to have been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. O’Neill graduated from Denison University and attended La Varenne in Paris. Her work has appeared in magazines ranging from the New Yorker and the New York Times to Readers Digest and Life. O’Neill’s books include Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball (Scribner, 2007) and American Food Writing: An Anthology with Classic Recipes (Library of America, 2007). Her next book, One Big Table, a portrait of the American table, will be published by Simon and Schuster in 2009.

Kathy Peiss is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has focused on the social and cultural history of American women in the 20th century and includes studies of working women and everyday life, working-class and interracial sexuality, and the American beauty industry. Her most recent book, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (Metropolitan Books, 1998), was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A Radcliffe Institute Fellow in 2005–2006, she is currently engaged in a study of librarians and information handlers, intelligence gathering, and cultural preservation and reconstruction in the World War II era, a project that originated in the discovery of the hidden life of a family member. She has also been working on a long-term project, “Designs for Living,” a cultural history of the mass middle class in the mid-20th century, its material culture aesthetics, and sensibilities.

Ruth Reichl is editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine. She has served as restaurant critic for New West and California magazines and for the Los Angeles Times, where she was also food editor, and the New York Times. Reichl began writing about food when she published Mmmmmmm: A Feastiary (Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1972). She has recently authored critically acclaimed, best-selling memoirs Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise (Penguin Press, 2005), Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table (Random House, 2001), and Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table (G. K. Hall, 1998). She is the editor of The Modern Library Food Series and of History in a Glass: Sixty Years of Wine Writing from Gourmet (Modern Library, 2006), The Gourmet Cookbook: More than 1000 Recipes (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), Remembrance of Things Paris: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet (Modern Library, 2004), and Endless Feasts: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet (Modern Library, 2003). Reichl is the executive producer of and makes frequent appearances on Gourmet’s Diary of a Foodie, a public television series. She hosted three episodes of Eating Out Loud on the Food Network and is a regular host with Leonard Lapote for a live monthly food show on WNYC radio in New York. Reichl has been honored with four James Beard Awards and with numerous awards from the American Association of Food Journalists and is a recipient of the YWCA’s Elizabeth Cutter Morrow Award.

Amartya Sen is a professor of economics and philosophy and the Lamont University Professor at Harvard University and was, until recently, the Master of Trinity College at Cambridge University. His research has included themes in economics, philosophy, and decision theory. He studied at Presidency College in Calcutta, India, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He has served as president of the Econometric Society, the Indian Economic Association, the American Economic Association, and the International Economic Association. He was formerly honorary president of OXFAM and is now its honorary advisor. Sen’s many books have been translated into more than 30 languages, and include Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (W. W. Norton, 2006), Inequality Reexamined (Harvard University Press, 1992), and Resources, Values and Development (Harvard University Press, 1984), among others. Sen is a distinguished fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, fellow of the British Academy, foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. Among the awards he has received are the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian award; the Senator Giovanni Agnelli International Prize in Ethics; the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Award; the Edinburgh Medal; the Brazilian Ordem do Merito Cientifico (Grã-Cruz); the Presidency of the Italian Republic Medal; the Eisenhower Medal; Honorary Companion of Honour (UK); The George E. Marshall Award; and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

Sharmila Sen is the editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press. Prior to joining the press in fall 2006, she was an assistant professor of English at Harvard University where she specialized in postcolonial Anglophone Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean. Sen earned her BA from Harvard and her PhD from Yale. She has published on Francophone African novels, gender and diaspora, postcolonial autobiographies, popular Bombay, as well as culinary cultures of Britain, India, and the Caribbean.

Steven Shapin is the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, a position he took up after previous appointments as professor of sociology at the University of California at San Diego and at the Science Studies Unit of Edinburgh University. His books include The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 1996), A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (University of Chicago Press, 1994), and Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton University Press, 1985; with Simon Schaffer). He has recently finished a book about scientific expertise and personal virtue in late modern America and is writing a short book on the history of dietetics. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books and has written for the New Yorker, including pieces on food and diet.

Laura Shapiro was a senior writer at Newsweek for many years, covering food, books, dance, and women’s issues. She is the author of Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986) and Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950’s America (Viking, 2004). Her latest book, Julia Child (Viking, 2007), is being published as part of the Penguin Lives series.

Vandana Shiva is the director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology in New Delhi, India. She trained as a physicist and earned her PhD, on the subject of hidden variables and non-locality in quantum theory, from the University of Western Ontario. She later shifted to interdisciplinary research in science, technology, and environmental policy. She is the founder of Navdanya, a movement for biodiversity conservation and farmers’ rights. For her contributions to deepening the ecological paradigm, and for linking research to action, Shiva has received many awards.

Peter N. Stearns is the provost of George Mason University. Stearns received his PhD from Harvard University and previously attended Harvard College. He has taught at Harvard; the University of Chicago; Rutgers University; and Carnegie Mellon University. He also served as dean of Carnegie Mellon’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Stearns is a past vice president of the American Historical Association. He founded and continues to serve as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Social History. Stearns is the author or editor of more than 90 books, most recently American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety (Routledge, 2006), Childhood in World History (Routledge, 2006), and American Behavioral History: An Introduction (New York University Press, 2005). He has published widely on world history and on related teaching issues, including several texts and readers, as well as thematic books on industrialization, gender, and consumerism.

Ruth Striegel-Moore is a professor of psychology and the Walter A. Crowell University Professor of Social Sciences at Wesleyan University. She is spending her sabbatical this year at Mount Holyoke as President Joanne V. Creighton’s American Council on Education Leadership Fellow. Striegel-Moore earned a diploma in psychology from the Eberhard-Karls University in Tuebingen, Germany, and a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of South Carolina at Columbia. She is recognized internationally for her research on the epidemiology and treatment of eating disorders. Her scholarship has been generously supported with funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Disease, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and has been recognized with research awards from the Academy of Eating Disorders and the Coalition for Eating Disorders Research, Policy, and Action.

Megan Vaughan is the Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge. Most of her work has been on the social and economic history of rural societies in eastern and central Africa and has focused on food production and consumption, gender relations, and the social history of medicine. More recently, she published on the history of slavery in the Indian Ocean. Vaughan is now working on the history of death in Africa and a “history of the emotions.” She has taught at the University of Oxford and the University of Malawi.

Barbara Ketcham Wheaton is a noted food historian, writer, and the honorary curator of the culinary collection at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. She is the author of the well-received Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983) and coauthor, with Patricia Kelly, of Bibliography of Culinary History: Food Resources in Eastern Massachusetts (G.K. Hall, 1987). For the past few years, she has been developing the Cook’s Oracle, a database that establishes relationships among recipes from different historical periods.

Psyche Williams-Forson is an assistant professor in the Department of American Studies and an affiliate of the women’s studies department at the University of Maryland at College Park. Her research and teaching interests include cultural studies, material culture, food, women’s studies, and social and cultural history of the United States in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Her recent work, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), examines the complexity of black women’s legacies using food as a form of cultural work. Her new research explores issues of class, entrepreneurship, and material culture in African American history and culture. She is the author of several articles and book chapters and the recipient of numerous fellowships, including a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and fellowships from the Maryland Historical Society, the Virginia Historical Society, and the Winterthur Museum and Library.

John Willoughby is the executive editor of Gourmet magazine and the coauthor, with Chris Schlesinger, of eight cookbooks, including Let the Flames Begin: Tips, Techniques, and Recipes for Real Live Fire Cooking (Norton, 2002) and the award-winning Thrill of the Grill: Techniques, Recipes & Down-Home Barbecue (W. Morrow, 1990). Before he came to Gourmet in 2001, he was the executive editor of Cook’s Illustrated and coauthor of a monthly column in the New York Times Dining Section, as well as an instructor in courses on food writing at Boston University and at Radcliffe. He has lectured widely, both nationally and internationally, on food, culture, and society. Willoughby currently appears on the PBS television show Gourmet’s Diary of a Foodie and is a regular guest on The Early Show on CBS on as well as the National Public Radio show The Splendid Table.