Name: Food Studies Workshop: Recipe Writing—Memories and Culinary Experience from Latin America
Start: 2026-04-13T12:00:00-05:00
Location: 2300 Red River St, Austin, TX, United States, Texas 78705

$Food Studies Workshop: Recipe Writing\u2014Memories and Culinary Experience from Latin America$

Food Studies Workshop: Recipe Writing—Memories and Culinary Experience from Latin America
Date: Monday April 13, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Location: SRH 1.313, LLILAS Hackett Room
LLILAS presents a food studies workshop led by Vanesa Miseres of Notre Dame University. The workshop explores the culinary arts as a site of cultural memory and identity, moving beyond simple domestic labor to view the kitchen as a space of creativity, resistance, and “doing as thinking.” Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s recognition of cooking as a vital, creative act, and Richard Sennett’s theory of craftsmanship, Miseres positions the cook as a “maker” whose embodied knowledge represents a sophisticated intellectual capital situated within the Latin American context. By addressing the challenge of transforming oral traditions and empirical “hand-knowledge” into expressive text, the workshop bridges the gap between technical instruction and the imagination. Participants will engage in “expressive direction” writing—an exercise that transcends dead denotation to center narrative, empathy, and ritual—demonstrating how the act of writing recipes provides a transformative learning experience, a platform for collective knowledge production, and a powerful pedagogical tool for introducing food studies concepts and approaches to the classroom.
Vanesa Miseres, Associate Professor of Spanish at Notre Dame University, specializes in the cultural and literary landscapes of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Latin America, her research and teaching exploring diverse topics such as travel writing, war literature, women writers, gender, cultural, and food studies. She is the author of Mujeres en tránsito: viaje, identidad y escritura en Sudamérica (1830–1910), which received the 2018 Alfredo Roggiano Prize for Latin American Literary Criticism from the IILI and an Honorable Mention for the Victoria Urbano Critical Monograph Prize from the Association of Gender & Sexuality Studies.
Free and open to the public. Lunch included. For more information, contact Paloma Díaz. <p.diaz />