Carla Cevasco

Please join us for the 2024 James Ford Bell Lecture, presented by Carla Cevasco, Associate Professor of American Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and author of Violent Appetites: Hunger in the Early Northeast. Her talk is titled, “A Mixture of Nations: Feeding Children and Empires in the Early American Northeast.”

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About the lecture

In the 17th and 18th centuries, English colonists seized Native land in what is now northeastern North America, aiming to replace Native people with colonists. Feeding children was thus essential to the British empire: more children would grow up to become more colonizers. Europeans of this era believed that race was a product of one’s environment, meaning that an English child who consumed Native American foods could become Native themselves. Yet as they invaded the northeast, colonists could not avoid contact with Native people or their foodways. English colonists who struggled to feed their own children found themselves dependent upon Native food and even breastmilk to survive. Haudenosaunee and Wabanaki peoples captured hundreds of English colonists, specifically targeting women and children, many of whom adapted to their new homes and refused to return to New England. Colonial leaders watched these developments with dismay, shocked that English children might choose Native cultures over their own and fearing that they might be transformed by their consumption of Native foods. These anxieties led to a pro-breastfeeding campaign in which British authorities pressured mothers to breastfeed their own babies to produce a healthy population of colonizers.

About the speaker

Carla Cevasco is a scholar interested in food, the body, gender, and race in early America and beyond. She is Associate Professor of American Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her first book, Violent Appetites: Hunger in the Early Northeast (Yale University Press, 2022), explores how Indigenous peoples and colonial invaders confronted hunger in the 17th and 18th centuries. She is working on a second book, Young and Hungry, a history of feeding infants and children in the United States. Her scholarship has appeared in Early American Studies, New England Quarterly, Art History, and Journal of Early American History. Her public writing has been featured in The Atlantic, TIME, Lapham’s Quarterly, Nursing Clio, Common-Place, The Junto, and The Recipes Project.

Program

• Lecture:  7-8:15 p.m.
• Dessert reception: 8:15 p.m.-9 p.m.

Event details

What: 2024 James Ford Bell Lecture | “A Mixture of Nations: Feeding Children and Empires in the Early American Northeast,” presented by Carla Cevasco
When: Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2024 | 7-9 p.m.
Where: Elmer L. Andersen Library | Parking and directions

This event is co-sponsored by the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota Libraries and by the Associates of the James Ford Bell Library.

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