The Fall 2024 Humanities Forum presents food writer, recipe developer, and food stylist Karla Tatiana Vasquez in conversation with food designer and artist Krystal C. Mack. In 2015, first-generation Salvadoran American, Karla T. Vasquez, began an online project to document recipes like the ones her mother made during her childhood. Over time, the project grew to include not only recipes, but also stories from the women who created them, offering a portrait of life for Salvadoran women both before the civil war and after their arrival in the United States. Vasquez will discuss The SalviSoul Cookbook and her efforts to preserve the food and stories of Salvadoran moms, aunts, grandmothers, and friends.

The annual Webb Lecture features Amanda Herbert, who will speak on Authorship, Authenticity, Erasure: British Atlantic Women’s Recipe Books, 1600–1850. British Atlantic women’s recipe books are crucial historical sources, offering evidence of the consumer and scientific revolutions, the rise of the city, female alliances, networks of knowledge and inquiry, and, perhaps most importantly, women’s authoritative voice. In this talk, Amanda Herbert demonstrates how free white women worked to deliberately erase Black food-workers from their practices of recipe writing, collection, and record-keeping; close reading of ingredients, techniques, and adaptations, however, can help us to recover Black culinary innovations and contributions.

The annual Ancient Studies Week Lecture features Phillip Mitsis of New York University. In reading ancient philosophers, we often face unsettling claims. A case in point is Plato’s view of hatred: he thinks that children must be taught to love the right things and to hate bad things. This talk examines the place of hatred in our moral lives and asks such questions as “Should we hate racism, genocide, sexism, etc., or is there no place for that?”

The annual Daphne Harrison Lecture features Dagmawi Woubshet, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Associate Professor, English, University of Pennsylvania, who will speak on James Baldwin and the Art of Late Style. James Baldwin has come back with full force in our era of Black Lives Matter. In the 100 years since his birth, he has become the most cited literary artist—living or dead—on matters of race on social media since the Ferguson Uprising, his words deployed to expose white power and innocence and to express black rage and ethics. Decades after his death, the fact that Baldwin’s words ring loud and true today not only testifies to his genius, but also offers an indictment of an America that continues to disparage, torture, and murder black people with impunity.

In this Humanities Forum talk, Adrian De Leon, Assistant Professor, History, New York University, discusses Diaspora’s Boondocks: Hinterlands in Filipino American History. How were the native people from the margins of empire, from Christianized lowlands peasants to sovereign indigenous people in the mountainous highlands, thrust into the center of late Spanish and American imperial projects of race-making across the Pacific? In this talk, Adrian De Leon re-routes the history of Filipino American migration to its indigenous roots in the bundok (Tagalog: the hinterland) of Northern Luzon.