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.

Maryland Humanities developed the One Maryland One Book (OMOB) initiative “to bring together diverse people in communities across the state through the shared experience of reading the same book.” This year's One Maryland One Book is What Storm, What Thunder by Myriam J.A. Chancy, and UMBC will participate in a statewide conversation about the title, which explores the impact of a 7.0 earthquake on the intersecting lives of a community in Haiti. This book discussion is held in partnership with the Arbutus Branch of the Baltimore County Public Library.

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?”