While revising Between the Acts in 1940, Virginia Woolf edited her drafts to reinforce the disruptive wartime shifts in food culture triggered by the Second World War: the novel notes a particular wariness for rationed beef and mutton, references the interwar freedom of easily obtaining bacon and oil, and suggests the indulgence of sugar consumption. The modernist moment saw a variety of such shifts in the alimentary, from increased industrialization and food processing to a more gastronomic turn to the realities of wartime food rationing that Woolf and others chart.

This CFP invites papers for a panel at MSA Boston that considers modernism and its foodways. As embodied practice and material ritual, foodways provide their own cultural “infrastructure,” with physical, affective, and communal consequences. This panel asks, how might foodways, broadly conceived, shape modernism and its aesthetics? Conversely, how might modernist forms influence foodways?

Please send abstracts of 200-300 words and a short bio to Kate Nash, Boston University (kmnash@bu.edu) by March 25, 2025.

https://www.moderniststudies.org/conference/MSA2025/CFP/