Distinguished Scholar Lecture: Professor Sander Gilman – “Why Are We Afraid Of Our Food? The U.S., China, And The Food Chain”

SANDER GILMAN
With Discussants 
MARION NESTLE, NYU
VICTOR BASCARA, U of Wisconsin — Madison

Sander Gilman, Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences at Emory University, explores the notion of dangerous citizens in a global perspective with his talk based on his latest research “Why Are We Afraid of Our Food? The U.S., China, And The Food Chain.”
Gilman investigates the anxiety about the origins of disease today in the food chain and their different readings as seen from the “West” and the “East” and the constitution of the “good and bad citizen” in the modern world. He will examine the debate about famine, obesity, and modernity in Republican China and today’s China, as well as the anxiety about the source of obesity and other food connected illness in the West.

RSVP by March 25, Tuesday

ABOUT:

Sander L. Gilman is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University, where he is the Director of the Program in Psychoanalysis and the Health Sciences Humanities Initiative. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of eighty books. His Oxford lectures Multiculturalism and the Jews appeared in 2006; his most recent edited volume, Diets and Dieting: A Cultural Encyclopedia appeared in 2007. He is the author of the basic study of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane, published by John Wiley and Sons in 1982 (reprinted: 1996) as well as the standard study of Jewish Self-Hatred, the title of his Johns Hopkins University Press monograph of 1986. For twenty-five years he was a member of the humanities and medical faculties at Cornell University where he held the Goldwin Smith Professorship of Humane Studies. For six years he held the Henry R. Luce Distinguished Service Professorship of the Liberal Arts in Human Biology at the University of Chicago and for four years was a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Medicine and creator of the Humanities Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. During 1990-1991 he served as the Visiting Historical Scholar at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; 1996-1997 as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA; 2000-2001 as a Berlin prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; 2004-5 as the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature at Oxford University. He has been a visiting professor at numerous universities in North America, South Africa, The United Kingdom, Germany, and New Zealand. He was president of the Modern Language Association in 1995. He has been awarded a Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) at the University of Toronto in 1997, elected an honorary professor of the Free University in Berlin (2000), and an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association (2007).

With Discussants:

Marion Nestle is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, in the department that she chaired from 1988 through 2003. She also holds appointments as Professor of Sociology in NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences and as a Visiting Professor of Nutritional Sciences in the College of Agriculture at Cornell University. Her degrees include a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health nutrition, both from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the politics of food with an emphasis on the role of food marketing as a determinant of dietary choice. She is the author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (University of California Press, 2002) and Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism (University of California Press, 2003), and is co-editor (with Beth Dixon) of Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Food and Nutrition (McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2004). Her latest book, What to Eat, was published by North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux in May, 2006. In 2007, Food Politics was issued in a revised and expanded edition. Her current projects include Pet Food Politics: Chichuahua in the Coal Mine (UC Press, scheduled for September 2008) and What Pets Eat (Harcourt, scheduled for 2009). For further information, go to www.foodpolitics.com and to her blog site, www.whattoeatbook.com.
Victor Bascara is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison (on leave 2006-8) where he teaches in the Department of English and Program in Asian American Studies. He is also an assistant professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California – Los Angeles. He is the author of Model Minority Imperialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and he teaches courses on Asian American cultural politics and United States imperialism.