Document Type
10 minute oral
Start Date
6-3-2026 3:00 PM
Description
Interdisciplinary work is increasingly valued in academia but carries intrinsic challenges, among them cross-disciplinary communication and jargon; disciplinary socialisation regarding the creation and transmission of knowledge; lack of a common foundation of knowledge or canon; lack of epistemological self-awareness; and the question of how to train scholars in the interdisciplinary space. Food Studies is an interdisciplinary field, examining food in society from various angles, including history, sociology, anthropology and folklore studies. Most scholars active in Food Studies have joined the field from their respective disciplines; however, there are also a small number of graduate programmes situated squarely in the interdisciplinary field, including the MA Gastronomy and Food Studies at TU Dublin. The experience of teaching on this course has shown that it can be a disorienting experience for novice scholars/postgraduate students to conceptualise food scholarship across the disciplines, for example in a Literary Food Studies module that requires them to read food in literature. To facilitate my students and others to apply their deep understanding of food in the context of literary scholarship, I have developed the nascent critical approach to reading food in imaginative texts of gastrocriticism. My contribution includes the development of a heuristic tool, the Gastrocritical Reading Questions (GCRQ). The GCRQ lead food scholars towards textual analysis, while in turn leading literary scholars towards a more nuanced appreciation of food scholarship. In this paper, I will outline the need for such pragmatic tools in Literary Food Studies pedagogy, as well as how they contribute to further developing the interdisciplinary field of Food Studies in terms of theory and method.
Included in
Gastrocritical Reading Questions: A Tool for Bridging the Interdisciplinary Gap between Food Studies and Literary Studies
Interdisciplinary work is increasingly valued in academia but carries intrinsic challenges, among them cross-disciplinary communication and jargon; disciplinary socialisation regarding the creation and transmission of knowledge; lack of a common foundation of knowledge or canon; lack of epistemological self-awareness; and the question of how to train scholars in the interdisciplinary space. Food Studies is an interdisciplinary field, examining food in society from various angles, including history, sociology, anthropology and folklore studies. Most scholars active in Food Studies have joined the field from their respective disciplines; however, there are also a small number of graduate programmes situated squarely in the interdisciplinary field, including the MA Gastronomy and Food Studies at TU Dublin. The experience of teaching on this course has shown that it can be a disorienting experience for novice scholars/postgraduate students to conceptualise food scholarship across the disciplines, for example in a Literary Food Studies module that requires them to read food in literature. To facilitate my students and others to apply their deep understanding of food in the context of literary scholarship, I have developed the nascent critical approach to reading food in imaginative texts of gastrocriticism. My contribution includes the development of a heuristic tool, the Gastrocritical Reading Questions (GCRQ). The GCRQ lead food scholars towards textual analysis, while in turn leading literary scholars towards a more nuanced appreciation of food scholarship. In this paper, I will outline the need for such pragmatic tools in Literary Food Studies pedagogy, as well as how they contribute to further developing the interdisciplinary field of Food Studies in terms of theory and method.