The Atlantic World Research Network, in partnership with Quaintance-Weaver Restaurants and Hotels and The Fresh Market, presents a unique feast of ideas and food—an international and interdisciplinary conference exploring four great transatlantic foodways: Carolina Lowcountry, African, Italian, and Spanish/Latin American. Featuring famed food scholars and leading chefs, our conference will bring together inquiring minds and discerning palates as we ask how transatlantic contact combined and transformed old foodways, and how those foodways have transformed us all. Conference activities will include multiple themed banquets and distinctive foodway demonstrations by featured chefs, and our exciting venues will include Greensboro's Proximity, America's greenest hotel, which proves that sustainability, beauty, and comfort can all share the same address.

Our conference will explore distinctive but inter-related foodways of the past—Pre-Columbian, Medieval and Renaissance Spanish and Italian, Pan-African, Latin American/Caribbean, Colonial and Antebellum Carolina Lowcountry. We will trace how distinctive food staples and flavors collided and combined with other foodways from around the Atlantic Rim to support whole new hybrid populations and cultures. We also will consider the growth and flourishing of the contemporary food recovery movement, which seeks out heirloom seeds, heritage breeds of livestock, and archival recipes to reproduce the eating experiences of our varied ancestors, and to revive the best (though perhaps to avoid the worst?) of their diets and flavors. In the process, we will consider the achievements, and the limits, of recovery food research and practice, as well as of the locavore and slow food movements that have done so much to make us intelligent, appreciative, conscientious—and sometimes obsessive and anxious—eaters. Paper and panel topics also will include the role of varied foodways in the literary imagination, the media, and the arts; the tensions between ecological and economic food sustainability; the science of food recovery, augmentation and genetic modification; the role of food in shaping historical events and developments; and the politics of food regulation and prohibition.

We invite proposals for papers and full panels in a variety of disciplines, including (but not necessarily limited to): history, food biology and zoology, classical and modern languages and literatures, culinary arts, media studies, anthropology, women's and gender studies, ethnography, art, religion and theology, rhetoric, communications, musicology, broadcast and cinema, and hospitality management. Interdisciplinary panel proposals and papers with interdisciplinary focus or potential are particularly welcome.
Proposals must be submitted via e-mail. For 15-20-minute papers, send a 250-word titled abstract; for a complete 3-4-person panel, send an overall title and individual 250-word titled abstracts for each paper. Please indicate AWF 2014 in your subject line and include a 1-page CV giving an e-mail and a regular mail address at which you can be reached; and indicate any expected audio-visual needs (including special software needs).

NOW DUE OCTOBER 16, 2013