CONWAY, Ark. (September 3,
2019) – Heather Paxson, Ph.D., an expert on artisan cheese production in the
U.S., will speak at Hendrix College Monday, Sept. 16, 2019, at 7 p.m. in
Lecture Hall B of the Mills Center for Social Sciences.
Her talk, “The Life of
Cheese: Searching for Value in an Artisanal Commodity,” is sponsored by the
Charles S. and Lucile Esmon Shively Odyssey Professorship, and is free and open
to the public.
Paxson teaches courses on
food, family, craft, ethnographic research, and the meaning of life at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is currently the William R.
Kenan, Jr. Professor of Anthropology and Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow. She
earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University and a B.A. from
Haverford College.
After serving as area editor
for the James Beard Award-winning Oxford
Companion to Cheese, Paxson in 2018 began a five-year term as a co-editor
of Cultural Anthropology, the
peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, a section of
the American Anthropological Association.
Paxson studies how people
craft a sense of themselves as moral beings in their everyday lives, especially
through activities having to do with family and food. She is the author of two
ethnographic monographs: Making Modern
Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece (University of
California Press, 2004) and The Life of
Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America (University of California Press,
2013), analyzing how craftwork has become a new source of cultural and economic
value within American landscapes of production and consumption. Her current research
concerns the practical and semiotic work of moving perishable foods across
international borders.
To learn more, contact Dr.
Stacey Schwartzkopf, the Charles S. and Lucile Esmon Shively Odyssey Associate
Professor of Anthropology, at schwartzkopf@hendrix.edu.
About
Hendrix College
A private liberal arts
college in Conway, Arkansas, Hendrix College consistently earns recognition as
one of the country’s leading liberal arts institutions, and is featured in Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That
Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges. Its academic quality and
rigor, innovation, and value have established Hendrix as a fixture in numerous
college guides, lists, and rankings. Founded in 1876, Hendrix has been
affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884. To learn more, visit www.hendrix.edu.