BIO:

I am part of Leiden University's Institute for Area Studies: School of Asian Studies, where I coordinate and lecture in a variety of theoretical and methodological courses at BA, MA and PhD level. Amongst them, I coordinate a lecture series for PhD candidates across faculties, entitled 'Discipline and Place in the Humanities and Social Sciences' (with Leiden Global), whereby higher education paradigms, research ethics and (inter) disciplinary identities are problematised from critical and decolonial stances. Positionality and reflexivity are central to my research and teaching. I am available to supervise Research Masters, Master students and PhD candidates, whose research focuses on maritime encounters in the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic, environmental colonialism, contemporary (non-positivist) notions of sustainability, the political ecology of waste and crisis, and ideas that offer critical perspectives to environmental topics and problematic.

BIO 

I am a cultural historian of early modern America, with particular interests in the connections between colonial health, embodiment, and environmental change, and in the ways that different colonial relationships, such as those between colonisers and Indigenous peoples, were formed, maintained, and often destabilised. In April 2021 my first monograph, Encountering early America, was published. It is the first study to comprehensively analyse sixteenth-century English projects in America, arguing that rather than being a period of inconsequential colonial failure, the sixteenth century instead represents a pivotal period in the history of English encounters with the Americas.

I completed my PhD at the University of Manchester in 2017 after which I was a Research Associate on the AHRC-funded project How we Used to Sleep. Between 2017 and 2020 I was a temporary Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Manchester before moving to the University of Leeds to take up an ISSF Wellcome Research Fellowship in September 2020. In May 2021 I returned to the University of Manchester as a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow.

My new research project, Environment, Emotion, and Diet in the Early Anglo-American Colonies, 1570-1660, investigates eating practices, access to food, and the connections between health, migration, and diet in a colonial context. The project breaks new ground by juxtaposing colonial environmental history and the history of emotions, and by adopting an interdisciplinary methodology that foregrounds the co-dependencies of colonists, Indigenous peoples, enslaved people, and their physical environments.

ABSTRACT

When the English first began colonising and settling in the lands of North America in the late sixteenth century they were confronted with a new, radically different, material environment. These lands across the Atlantic, although appearing similar to England in some respects, were home to unique flora and fauna and to botanical material that differed dramatically to that found in Europe. This paper will explore these early environmental encounters and the important dietary decisions that they shaped. The paper will assess initial attempts made by English colonists to reshape the American environment into one that could produce profitable and sought-after commodities like wine, silk, and flax, arguing that the English lacked the necessary skills and micro-botanical knowledge to produce such products. By focusing on these failed crops, rather than on the success of tobacco that has dominated the discussion of English agriculture in early America, this paper explores the ecological reasons for these failures and demonstrates the impact that they had on settler diets. The initial fixation with producing profitable crops forced English colonists to look towards Indigenous foodways, both cultivated and wild, for sustenance. By focusing on English engagement with Indigenous food produce, this paper will question recent scholarship that has argued that English settlers went to great lengths to recreate English diets in the New World, proposing instead that early colonists were reliant on, and indeed deeply curious of, Indigenous agricultural and food practices and the small-scale produce they cultivated. 

The paper considers both small-scale materiality in colonial North America, through textual sources, and microscopic records from early modern America in the form of archaeobotanical assemblages from the early years of the Jamestown colony. By analysing textual and archaeobotanical material records together, this paper will argue that early modern knowledge of micro-materials was put to work in order to make the new material realities encountered in North America understandable, and in some cases profitable, and that microscopic food remnants from this period can provide new insights into settler diets, Anglo-Indigenous botanical exchange, and American agricultural change. Microscopic environmental records, then, demonstrate both a commitment on the part of English colonists to European practices of cultivation, especially regarding the production of commodities, and botanical curiosity related to food provisioning that was born from necessity.  

Lauren Pankin: Rooted by the Vine: The Creation of Settler Identities in Colonial Algeria, 1830-193

BIO

I research how businesses mobilize the concept of "patrimoine" (heritage, tradition, connection and practices to a particular piece of land) in an era of integrated global markets. I am especially interested in how this concept is translated between different cultures. In my undergraduate thesis, I studied how intensely localized French wine production depends upon a socio-cultural construction of its very "Frenchness"-- key not only to cementing wine's national cultural relevance, but to making it attractive to lucrative international investment (in particular, that of the Chinese).

At ENS Paris-Saclay, I am researching questions of patrimony and national identity through the lens of the French Algerian wine trade, from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century. In particular, I am studying how Algerian vignerons use discourses of political rights to equality with the metropole to advocate for profitable economic policy.

ABSTRACT

In May 1831, a French merchant in Algiers wrote that it would only take “manpower and enlightened farmers” to produce “all the transatlantic commodities that we are now obliged to seek in another hemisphere”--including wine. This paper argues that the intensive cultivation of the vast Euro-Algerian vineyard is necessarily co-constitutive with the development of a contested French-Algerian settler identity. The growth and abundance of the Euro-Algerian vineyard is one of the more often forgotten agricultural and commodity histories of the colonial canon. Like the sugar cane of the French West Indies or the cotton of British India, the wine of the Algerian vineyard forged new imperial identities, although it is unique in its status as one of the few colonial crops to ever compete with metropolitan production of the same crop. As the Euro-Algerian vineyards expanded, they gave new definitions to the imperial lands known as French Algeria, as well as new definitions to the colony’s inhabitants. The paper chronologically traces the story of Euro-Algerian wine production, beginning with the imperial plan for a conquest by “sword and plow” and ending with the struggle of government-winemaker coalitions in the 1930s to check an exploding Algerian viticultural yield, which had been catalyzed by new agricultural capitalist practices and advances in monoculture. Drawing upon environmental historian William Cronon’s colonial notion of “seeing landscapes in terms of commodities,” this paper illustrates the political and environmental complications of imagining and building a settler colonial commodity landscape rooted in a crop integral to the metropolitan domestic economy. This paper thus contributes to a growing literature of colonial agricultural studies at the intersection of social history and environmental history. To achieve this dual positioning, the paper employs archival sources such as Third Republic newspaper columns, reports from fin-de-siècle Republican government expeditions to Algeria, and transcripts from powerful lobbying groups. These sources reveal the semiotic quality of wine in a contentious trans-Mediterranean French imaginary, as well as the material reality of a colonial monoculture crop that emerged as the key source of settler wealth--only because of the near-annihilation of the metropolitan vineyard due to a New World vine pest. While the vineyard at times represents French imperial interest and investment in a prosperous Algeria, it also comes to symbolize pestilence, decadence, ruin, and dissension. By the turn of the century, some colonial outposts in Algeria were supplied with more wine than water, a reflection not only of the Algerian environment but of the tremendous modifications made to it by settlers determined to transform desert land into a new--yet different--France.

Efrat Gilad, Netta Cohen - Culinary Climates: Food and the Environment among Jewish Settlers in British Mandate Palestine

BIO Efrat Gilad

I am a social and cultural historian with a keen interest in food, consumption, and the environment. I completed my PhD in International History at The Graduate Institute, Geneva in 2021. My PhD thesis Meat in the Heat: A History of Tel Aviv under the British Mandate for Palestine (1920s–1940s) was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Doc.CH grant.

At the Institute of Jewish Studies, I serve as a postdoc for the project “Jewish Studies, Ecology, and Sustainability”. Here, I study the ecologies and economies of livestock and meat in Palestine and the region from the Mandate period into Israel’s first years. I teach courses on Jewish environmental encounters with the land of Palestine, focusing on topics such as agriculture, animals, climate, food, hygiene, and the body.

My areas of competence are global food studies, environmental history (with a focus on agriculture and animals), Palestine/Israel, modern Jewish history, urban history, imperialism, colonialism, and settler-colonialism.

BIO Netta Cohen

I completed my doctoral degree in 2019 at the Centre for History of Science, Medicine and Technology. In the course of my doctoral studies I received several scholarships and fellowships, including the Oxford-Pears Foundation Scholarship, the Leo Baeck scholarship, the graduate research fellowship at the Center for Jewish History in New York City and a research affiliation at the Taub Center for Israel Studies in NYU. In 2018 I co-founded the Oxford Environmental History Network (OEHN) which aims to connect researchers working on environmental history in the University of Oxford.

Research interests: Environmental History; History of Knowledge; History of Science, Medicine and Technology; Modern Jewish History; History of Zionism; Global and Colonial History; Transnational History. 

ABSTRACT

Our paper will discuss Zionist attempts to develop a ‘Hebrew cuisine’, or a national diet, within the Jewish European settler community in Palestine (the Yishuv) during the British Mandate period. Under British rule, European Jews from various countries settled in Palestine in unprecedented numbers. The new Jewish diet, however, was not meant to incorporate various traditional Jewish foodways into one comprehensive cuisine, nor did it intend to embrace local Palestinian food culture. Instead, food was meant to serve Zionist national and colonial aspirations. During the Mandate period, Zionist leaders urged Jewish settlers to eat in a manner that corresponded with Zionist agricultural endeavors. By consuming the produce of Palestine’s soil, Jewish settlers were expected to familiarize their bodies with the land, as if food had the power to plant them into their new environment and aid their transformation into so-called native people. Yet ironically, as our paper will argue, the physical acclimatisation of Jewish European settlers depended on cultivating and consuming not only native crops – such as local grains, fruits, and vegetables – but also acclimatised ones such as avocados, mangos, and bananas. Even beyond crop cultivation, acclimitisation became a driving force behind other Zionist agricultural endeavors in Palestine. Zionist planners, for example, invested greatly in creating a national dairy industry. They imported European cattle breeds to Palestine, crossbred them with local species, and created artificial environments to optimize milk production, essentially engineering a ‘local’ productive milk cow. The logics and practices of acclimatisation expanded from crop cultivation to adopting and adapting entire industries from Europe to Palestine. By implementing modern and costly technologies, introducing foreign animal and plant species, and implanting new food industries, Zionist agricultural experts in Palestine wished to increase food production. This was not only profitable but also essential for achieving food security among the settler society. Simultaneously, investing in acclimatised foods and industries corresponded with the Zionist incorporation of other Western fields of expertise such as hygiene and the science of nutrition. By illuminating these Zionist ventures as a whole, we aim to illustrate how the symbiosis between foreign settlers and non-native foodways showcases the foreign characteristics of the Zionist project in Palestine. With this paper, we ask to contribute to the broader discussion on the interdependence of landscapes and cuisines in colonial spaces. Examining various primary sources such as professional and popular writings on food as well as agricultural reports and economic surveys, we will illustrate how the new Jewish diet was designed to deliver the nutritional values required for the formation of a new and ‘improved’ ‘Jewish body’ in Palestine as well as respond to the challenges presented to the settlers by the local climate. By approaching the link between notions on food and the environment in the Zionist context we wish to analyze the absorption of colonial knowledge among Jewish European experts, their approach to local Palestinian knowledge, and the link between nutrition, productivity, food production, and political economy.