Helen B. Kampmann Marodin, who holds a PhD in History with a specialization in Latin American history and an MA in Art History from the University of South Carolina, examines how embodied culinary practices, including physical, sensory, affective, and cognitive processes, shape the production of knowledge and historical meaning. Focusing on Brazilian history, her research combines historical analysis, digital humanities methods, and insights from neuroscience to investigate culinary texts, taste, and the formation of national identity from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

Is it possible to translate flavor, a multisensory and deeply emotional experience, into data? How can computational methods engage embodiment, memory, and affect without flattening them into abstraction? This talk explores how a corpus of nearly 33,000 recipes drawn from fifty-three Brazilian cookbooks published between 1840 and the mid-twentieth century can illuminate shifting racial and social hierarchies embedded in culinary literature.

By structuring recipe titles, cooking techniques, language markers, and ingredient lists as analyzable data, recurring patterns emerge. Named-entity recognition and frequency analysis make visible the presence, and the telling absence, of racial and social references across thousands of recipes, highlighting tensions between ideological projects of national representation and everyday taste practices. “Flavor as data” thus becomes both a methodological strategy and a critical inquiry into the possibilities of representing the lived experience of flavor within digital humanities research.

Where? In Room TCL 204

Sponsored by the Humanities Collaborative of the McCausland Arts and Sciences