Mary Beaudry to deliver McDonald Lecture 2012

We are delighted to announce that Professor Mary Beaudry will deliver the McDonald Lecture 2012 at 5.00pm on Wednesday 21st November at the Large Lecture Theatre, Department of Plant Sciences, adjacent to the McDonald Institute in the Downing Site, Downing Street, Cambridge (map .pdf). The Lecture will be followed by a wine reception to which all are welcome.

Mary C. Beaudry is Professor of Archaeology, Anthropology, and Gastronomy at Boston University, where since 1980 she has taught historical and industrial archaeology, archaeological method and theory, and archaeology of colonialism and has directed undergraduate and graduate study in historical archaeology; she helped found the Gastronomy master's degree at Boston University in 1991 and has taught anthropology of food and the material culture of cookery and dining in that program. She has conducted fieldwork in Massachusetts, Maine, Virginia, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, the Caribbean, and the Western Isles of Scotland.

She is author of Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing (Yale 2006); co-editor of Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement (Springer, 2013), Interpreting the Early Modern World: Transatlantic Perspectives (Springer 2011), The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (Oxford 2010), The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology (Cambridge 2006), The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology (CRC Press 1992); co-author of Living on the Boott: Historical Archaeology at the Boott Mills Boardinghouses, Lowell, Massachusetts (University of Massachusetts Press 1996); editor of Documentary Archaeology in the New World (Cambridge 1988), and author of over 100 articles on historical archaeology. Her current publishing projects include writing a book on contemporary material culture studies in archaeology and anthropology and co-editing an encyclopedia of the archaeology of food.

Her current research and the topic of her McDonald lecture melds her interests in food, material culture, and theories of practice, identity, and gender in bringing together multiple lines of evidence—archaeological, documentary, visual arts—to interpret the practices, experiences, and aesthetics of cookery and dining in the early modern world.