About me

A book cover for "Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer"; a picture of a smiling womanI’m a late-blooming scholar, a naturalized American, and an anthropologist who stumbled into the grocery business. I teach at Tufts University in Boston, and I live in north-central Massachusetts.

I started out being fascinated by myth and ritual, found my way from there into American history (via the Civil War and studying the people who reenacted it), and then started trying to figure out where the heritage business fits in the postindustrial knowledge and service economy.

Over the past decade-plus, I’ve been thinking about ways to connect my interest in commemorative behavior with the ever more urgent questions about how we might create a less energy-intensive, growth-oriented society. That has led me to explore the convergence of historic sites and contemporary food systems as well as into the hands-on business of food retail, not a place I ever thought I’d be. Read more about this here.

5 Comments

  1. I’m planning on giving a presentation to the TICCIH 2021 conference in Montreal. I’m a retired engineer (McGill ’62) and amateur historian who got hooked on the works of Fred Stark Pearson (Tufts University). The Toronto Power Station (TPS) located on top of Horseshoe Falls, Niagara Falls would be the subject of my paper. I think the attendees would be interested in TPS’s unique engineering features, its passive de-icing scheme, rugged underwater redundant structures, its water tunnel discharging water behind the falls, and its graceful permanent design. Ultimately, perhaps, I would like the ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers) and the IEEE (Institute of Electric and Electronic Engineers) to commemorate TPS as a landmark/ milestone electric generation engineering station

  2. I studied political science at Notre Dame in the early 80’s. One of my courses was called “Bureaucracy.” I particularly appreciated a book that we read during the class about the National Park Service, the culture of park rangers. I cannot recall the book title, but given your background, I am hopeful that you may the book or can suggest other titles. Was a fascinating topic. A friend’s daughter is considering a career in the park service so thought it might be interesting. Any ideas?

  3. I studied political science at Notre Dame in the early 80’s. One of my courses was called “Bureaucracy.” I particularly appreciated a book that we read during the class about the National Park Service, the culture of park rangers. I cannot recall the book title, but given your background, I am hopeful that you may the book or can suggest other titles. Was a fascinating topic. A friend’s daughter is considering a career in the park service so thought it might be interesting. Let me know

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