Assistant Professor
301.405.6931
pwforson@umd.edu
Psyche Williams-Forson is an Assistant Professor in the department and is an affiliate faculty member of the Women's Studies Department. In 1998, she co-founded (with Mary Corbin Sies) of the Material Culture/Visual Culture Working Group which is now a research program area of the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity at the University of Maryland. Her research and teaching interests include cultural studies, material culture, food, and women’s studies along with social and cultural history of the U.S. in the late 19th and 20th centuries. She is particularly interested in the ways that power functions in our everyday lives. Her recent work examines the complexity of black women's legacies using food as a form of cultural work. She explores material ranging from personal interviews to the comedy of Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle, from commercial advertisements to the art of Kara Walker, and from cookbooks to literature, to consider the ways black women use certain foods to arrive at degrees of self-definition and self-reliance. Armed with this knowledge we can understand how foods like chicken are rooted in complex relationships that are fraught with both racism and agency. Her new research explores issues of class and entrepreneurship in African American material culture from the late 19th century to the present.
She is the recipient of several fellowships including a Lord Baltimore Research Fellowship from the Maryland Historical Society (2006), Ford Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship (2005), Francis Lewis Fellowship in Women’s Studies from the Virginia Historical Society (2003), and a Winterthur Library Research Fellowship (1996). She is also the curator of “Still Cookin’ by the Fireside,” an online text and photo exhibition on the history of African American cookery for the Smithsonian Institution’s Anacostia Museum.
Degrees:
Ph.D, American Studies (Univ of Maryland, 2002)
M.A., American Studies, Women’s Studies Certificate (Univ of Maryland, 1994)
B.A., English/African American Studies, Women’s Studies (U of Virginia, 1987)
Publications:
- Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, & Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
- “Suckin’ the Chicken Bone Dry: African American Women, History and Food Culture.” Cooking Lessons: The Politics of Gender and Food. Ed. Sherrie Inness. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) 200 – 214.
- “African Americans and Food Stereotypes.” African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture. Ed. Ann Bower. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming).
- Williams-Forson, Psyche & Tony Whitehead. Entry on “African American Foodways.” Encyclopedia of Food and Culture. Ed. Solomon Katz. NY: Thomson Gale, Inc. 2002.
Courses Taught:
Diasporic Cultures (graduate)
Feminist Cultural Criticism in Literature of the African Diaspora (graduate)
Material Aspects of American Life (undergraduate)
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