Tasting History: Food and Memory in Williamsburg

Colonial Williamsburg has, from its earliest days, invited visitors to step back in time and embody the past. In this talk, Marie Pellissier, doctoral candidate in History, will discuss how people in eighteenth-century Williamsburg used food to help define their relationship to England, and will follow those themes forward to the period of the Williamsburg Restoration in the early twentieth century. Learn about the ways people in Williamsburg have used food to connect with the past, and how foodways were an integral part of defining what it meant to be “colonial.” This research explores food as important aspect of local history in Williamsburg, connecting a universal, everyday human experience with larger historical forces.

The Emerging Scholars Series is a partnership between the Arts & Sciences Graduate Center at William & Mary and the Williamsburg Regional Library. The series features W&M graduate students in talks hosted by the WRL intended to bring cutting-edge research to the local community.