EMROC Members are scholars whose teaching and research are deeply committed to early modern recipes and their transcription.
Margaret E. Boyle is an Associate Professor at Bowdoin College, where she teaches courses on the literature and culture of early modern Spain and colonial Latin America, as well as feminist, gender and sexuality studies. She is the author of Unruly Women: Performance, Penitence and Punishment in Early Modern Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2014), awarded the Vern Williamsen Comedia Book Prize and Honorable mention for Best Book of 2014 from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. She is at work on a new volume with Sarah E. Owens tentatively titled Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective, which includes scholarship on recipes as culinary and curative.
David B. Goldstein is a poet, critic, food writer, and an Associate Professor at York University in Toronto. His first monograph, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England, shared the 2014 biennial Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award. He has also published two books of poetry and has co-edited two essay collections, Culinary Shakespeare (with Amy Tigner) and Shakespeare and Hospitality (with Julia Lupton). His essays on early modern literature, Emmanuel Levinas, food studies, ecology, and contemporary poetry have appeared in Studies in English Literature, Shakespeare Studies, Gastronomica, and numerous other journals and collections.
Marissa Nicosia is an Assistant Professor of English at Penn State Abington where she teaches, researches, and writes about early modern English literature, book history, and political theory. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania and previously taught at Scripps College. Marissa’s current book project studies the history play in the seventeenth-century to argue that the genre forged speculative political futures. Her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon- Rare Book School Fellowship in Critical Bibliography and the Folger Institute. With Alyssa Connell, she is the co-founder of Cooking in the Archives: Updating Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen, a public history digital humanities project that curates transcribed and updated recipes from early modern English household manuscripts for an audience of food historians and culinary enthusiasts alike.
Carol Pal is a former auto mechanic and a former pastry chef. Suddenly, in 1994, she realized she had completely forgotten to go to college. She enrolled as a freshman at Mills, found her calling as a historian, and received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2007. Following postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford and the Clark Library at UCLA, she has taught history at Bennington College since 2008, spending the 2012-13 academic year as Dibner Fellow in the History of Science at the Huntington Library.
Pal’s first book, Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2012), was awarded the American Historical Association’s Joan Kelley Memorial Prize for best book in women’s history. In addition to chapters in various edited collections, Pal is also editing a source book in the history of medicine for Routledge, and is completing a volume on the work of Marie du Moulin for the series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Her next monograph, entitled Transient Technologies, explores some of the lost practices of early modern knowledge-making.
Sarah Powell is the EMMO Paleographer at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She has an MA (Dubl.) in Latin from Trinity College, University of Dublin. She earned her PGCE (Post Graduate Cert in Education) in Latin with Classics from King’s College, University of London and worked as a teacher for over a decade before joining EMMO. Sarah also works on EMMO’s sister Humanities crowd-sourced project Shakespeare’s World.
Giovanni Pozzetti is a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds (UK) and will submit his thesis in early 2018. His main research interest lies in the many intersections between culinary and medical cultures in early modern Europe. His doctoral research investigates and compares the reception of classical medical knowledge in early modern Italy and England, focusing on the way and to what extent different foods were consumed and, thus, the assimilation of Galenic theories in different European knowledge contexts. In 2016, Giovanni spent a month working at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (Germany).
Melissa Schultheis is a Ph.D. student in English at Rutgers University. Her interest in early modern recipes coincides with research interests in the history of medicine, gender and sexuality, and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry and drama. She has been an EMROC transcriber since 2015 and is currently working on a paper that considers recipes, the feminized body, and colonial travel in Dryden and Davenant’s Tempest.
Nancy Simpson-Younger is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Pacific Lutheran University. Her book project, Watching the Sleeper in Early Modern English Literature, asks how sleeping people are viewed, re-identified, and judged when they can’t respond–and what this might mean for concepts of identity or personhood in the period. Her work has appeared in Shakespeare, The Sidney Journal, and Staging the Blazon, and is forthcoming in Studies in Philology and Women’s Writing.
Joul Smith is a PhD (ABD) student at the University of Texas at Arlington, the assistant director of the UTA Writing Center, and has been the recipient of several research fellowships (Bob and Ann Utley and the Carrizo Oil and Gas, Inc., among others). His current projects demonstrate the connections between Renaissance humanism and modern American rhetoric through readings of early modern manuscripts, religious texts, and translation studies. His forthcoming publications with Taylor-Hunt and McFarland provide cultural readings from traditional and early modern perspectives. Recently, his presentation, “The English Tongue: Tyndale’s Translation and the Age of the Anglophone” explored Galenic perceptions of the tongue and its metaphorical role in religious texts.
Samantha Snively is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of California Davis. Her dissertation project, which features manuscript recipe collections, traces incorporation as tool for knowledge-formation across a variety of sites in early modern England including the household, the law, and the theater. She has been transcribing for EMROC since summer 2015, and is currently pondering why a number of recipes call for dissected earthworms. This summer, she will be traveling to London to study manuscript recipes at the British and Wellcome Libraries, and welcomes suggestions for weird and wonderful recipes to look at.
Rob Wakeman has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Maryland and currently is Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of South Florida. His dissertation, “Eating Animals in Tudor and Stuart Theaters,” tracks the changing status of animals along the path from farm to fork in Shakespeare’s forest plays, Jonson’s city comedies, and the pastoral plays of the Towneley Manuscript and Chester Cycle. Amid deep structural changes in the food economy, hunters, shepherds, and urban meat vendors conceive of socioecological ethics at the micro level of the meal by presenting divergent ideas about how animals ought to be raised, slaughtered, and eaten. Rob’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Arthuriana, Objected-Oriented Environs (Eds. Cohen and Yates), and Ground-Work: Soil Science in Renaissance Literature (Ed., Eklund).
Breanne Weber is a Ph.D. student in English Literature at the University of California, Davis, where she explores early modern women’s writing via the intersections of early science/alchemy, poetics, book history, eco-materiality, and religion. She first began working with EMROC and the Folger’s EMMO project in 2014, and ever since has been thinking about the particular epistemologies, practices, and networks made visible through manuscript recipe books. Breanne is also the social media coordinator for EMROC, and you can find her tweeting @bre_weber.