Making Space for the Middle East and North Africa in Global Food Studies

From the commissioning of court cookbooks by Abbasid caliphs and the cultivation of Persian Gulf dates for eighteenth-century Indian Ocean tastes to the more recent popularization of the “Mediterranean diet” and the engineering of famines in Palestine and Yemen, the politics and culture of food have been central to understanding life in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Nevertheless, the growing field of global food studies generally neglects MENA. On the other hand, a wave of studies by regional specialists in the last two decades have illuminated the ties between intimate experience of food and drink to broader processes ranging from commerce, migration and governance to popular memory and environmental change —without always registering connections to the wider literature on food studies. What might be gained by bringing these bodies of scholarship together?

To that end, the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University will hold a one-day workshop, “A Seat at the Table: Making Space for the Middle East and North Africa in Global Food Studies,” in Fall 2026. This workshop will give scholars the chance to share drafts of article-length works on food and foodways in MENA from approximately 1500 to the present. This material will demonstrate, on the one hand, the theoretical and empirical importance of MENA to global food studies, and, on the other, how the lens of food and foodways can help us rethink key themes and metanarratives in Middle East studies. The workshop seeks to feature diverse methodological perspectives, including those originating in less-represented disciplines such as art history, architecture and musicology. Likewise, it hopes to solicit research not only from familiar sub-regions like Egypt and the Levant but also less common areas like the Gulf, and to develop theory grounded in the diverse histories and social formations of the wider MENA region. The organizers plan on collecting submissions for publication in an edited volume or special journal issue following revisions based on workshop feedback.