Dr. Sarah Fouts
Tenured
Department of American Studies
College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
They/Them/Theirs/Themselves
About
Sarah Fouts is an Associate Professor in American Studies, co-director of the Public Humanities program, and affiliate faculty in the Language, Literacy, and Culture doctoral program. Her work spans food and labor studies, New Orleans and Honduras, ethnography, disasters, quilting, and community-engaged research.Her book Rebuilding New Orleans: Immigrant Laborers and Street Food Vendors in the Post-Katrina Era (UNC Press, 2025) examines Central American and Mexican migration after Hurricane Katrina, showing how immigrant workers—despite criminalization and exploitation—forge multiracial solidarities and grassroots movements that reshape the city’s politics and culture.
Building on this research, Fouts co-produced two documentary shorts for the American Folklife Center’s Homegrown Foodways Series (2023): El Camino del Pan a Baltimore and El Camino del Mole a New Orleans, both screened at the Maryland and New Orleans Film Festivals. Her next book project, Disaster Foods, takes a transnational, historical, and ethnographic approach to how people are fed during crises. She is also developing a collaborative documentary series on the relationship between New Orleans and Honduras, supported by a 2025–2026 residency at A Studio in the Woods.
Fouts was a 2022–2024 Whiting Public Engagement Fellow for “Project Neutral Grounds: At the Intersection of People, Food, and the Hustle,” and principal investigator of the ACLS-funded “Baltimore Field School 2.0: Undoing and Doing Anew in Public Humanities” (2022–2023). Both projects advance collaborative, community-based research models.
Her teaching integrates public humanities initiatives including Baltimore’s Sabor de Highlandtown and Five-Minute History: Baltimore Album Quilts, as well as partnerships with the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, Southern Foodways Alliance, and the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice. Fouts also produced and edited “Latinx Foodways in North America” for SAFN and contributes writing to outlets including the New York Times, NACLA, and Gravy.
Research interests
U.S. South, migration, food, labor, political economy, New Orleans, multiracial organizing, transnationalism in the AmericasTeaching interests
Ethnography, Food, Migration, Labor, Transnationalism, Public Humanities, Qualitative MethodsEducation
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Ph D
— Tulane University (2017) Tacos, Gumbo, and Work: The Politics of Food and the Value of Labor
- MS, Urban Studies — University of New Orleans (2012)
- BA, History, Spanish — Centre College (2003)