Julia Fine

Class of 2019, European Studies
Ph.D. student in History at Stanford University
Julia Fine

Thesis Title: "Civilized Man Cannot Live Without Cooks": Food and Empire in Colonial India

What Now: Ph.D. student in History at Stanford University 

What Next: I’ll let you know in six more years! 

Follow Me: @juliafine19 (Twitter) and @juliarfine (Instagram) 

It sounds a little corny, but I still remember when I first realized that food could be — and should be — a legitimate object of study. I was in my sophomore tutorial, and we read a paper by Elizabeth Buettner on South Asian restaurants in London and how discourse surrounding the restaurants reveals the "persistent yet evolving dialectic between the rejection, and embrace, of the 'other.'" In discussing the article with my classmates and my tutors, what emerged to me is that food and eating encode within themselves issues of gender, class, race, environmental change, and more, making them an incredibly potent object of study.

Since that day in sophomore tutorial, I have been studying the history of food and the British Empire. From my junior paper exploring advertisements of London’s oldest Indian restaurant to my senior thesis looking at food and imperial statecraft in British India, Hist & Lit allowed me to delve into food studies and imperial history, asking critical questions about the way food functioned throughout the British Empire.
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​After graduating, I continued to explore the relationship between food and empire inside and outside academia. The year after graduating, I worked as a Humanities Fellow  at Dumbarton Oaks and the Folger Shakespeare Library. At the Folger, I worked on the $1.5 million Mellon-funded “Before ‘Farm to Table’” project, which explored the history of food in the early modern period. I wrote papers on tea in the early modern Indian Ocean world, organized conference panels on early modern foodways, and presented papers on the history of turmeric's color in Britain. At Dumbarton Oaks, I researched the history of Carolina rice and turmeric, and designed and coded interactive exhibits on the foodstuffs. I then went to University of Cambridge, where I explored the history of salt production in India and received an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies. 

I recently started my PhD at Stanford University, where I am continuing my research on food, environment, and empire (and exploring all the food the Bay Area has to offer). I’m not sure where this path will take me, but I am forever grateful to Hist & Lit for getting me started on it! 


 

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