How does listening to food change the way we farm, cook, eat, and share? How can the power of sensory experience help humans learn to value food differently?

During this seminar, Melissa Van Drie will share reflections from her current Sounds Delicious Project, which studies sound, listening and sonic practices in everyday food making (19th-21st Centuries), with initial study-cases from the Nordic countries and France. The project examines how thinking through sound can help craft new sensibilities to and alternative narratives of food production and environmental relations.The project began with the observation that sound is often absent in food histories, yet sound has a role in connecting people to food and is part of what gives food vitality. Together we will discuss what turning an ear to food preparation reveals about the kinds of orientations, agencies, and knowledges that make up food, and the dynamic relationships between humans, nonhumans, and materials.

Biography

Melissa Van Drie is a historian-researcher, project maker, and performer currently living in Copenhagen. She works across the disciplines of theatre, music, the history of science and technology, and food to write cultural histories of sound and listening. Most recently, she created the Sound Delicious Project during a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship at the University of Copenhagen. She has researched extensively on auditory cultures in the 19th Century, exploring the kinds of devices (phonograph, theatrophone, stethoscope), experiments, spectacular stagings, and ideas that contributed to a change in how sound and listening were used to create knowledge in occidental cultures (with a focus on France). She also creates performance-lectures, reenactments with artefacts, cooking workshops, and sensory exhibitions. She holds a Master in Musicology from NYU, a PhD in Theatre Studies from the Sorbonne-Paris 3, and has held Postdocs at the EHESS, the CNRS, the University of Maastricht and Cambridge.