Participant Info
- First Name
- Rachel
- Last Name
- Herrmann
- Country
- United Kingdom
- State
- herrmannr@cardiff.ac.uk
- Affiliation
- Cardiff University
- Website URL
- https://rachelbherrmann.com/
- Keywords
- Hunger, food history, Native American History, the American Revolution, cannibalism, slavery
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- I prefer to be contacted by email in the first instance.
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
I specialize in colonial, Revolutionary, Native American, and Atlantic history, with particular focus on food and hunger in the Atlantic World. I am interested in the ways that people used hunger to forge alliances and engage in violence, and curious about how hunger’s meanings have changed over time. I’ve spoken to the media about the history of food, and the history of Native American mascots.
I’m originally from Manhattan, and earned my BA at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. I completed my PhD in history at the University of Texas at Austin in 2013 after two year-long predoctoral fellowships at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (in Philadelphia) and at International Security Studies at Yale (in New Haven). Before working at Cardiff, I worked as a Lecturer in Early Modern American History at the University of Southampton from 2013 to 2017.
- Recent Publications
No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019)
Editor, To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2019)
“‘No useless Mouth’: Iroquoian Food Diplomacy in the American Revolution,” Diplomatic History, 41, no. 1 (January 2017): 20-49.
“Rebellion or riot?: black Loyalist food laws in Sierra Leone,” Slavery & Abolition, 37, no. 4 (December 2016): 680-703.
“‘Their Filthy Trash’: Taste, Eating, and Work in Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, 12, no. 1-2 (March 2015): 45-70.
“The ‘tragicall historie’: Cannibalism and Abundance in Colonial Jamestown,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 68, no. 1 (January 2011): 47-74. Excerpted and republished in Major Problems in American History, vol. 1, 4th edition, ed. Elizabeth Cobbs and Edward J. Blum (Cengage Learning, 2016), 54-60.
I am also the PI on”Geographies of Power on Land and Water: Space, People, and Borders,” an AHRC Networking Scheme Grant on landed and maritime borders and boundaries in the Atlantic World.
- Media Coverage
- Social Media
- @Raherrmann
- Country Focus
- Expertise by Geography
- Atlantic, North America, United States
- Expertise by Chronology
- 17th century, 18th century, Early Modern
- Expertise by Topic
- American Revolution, American Founding Era, Diplomacy, Food History, Indigenous Peoples, Military, Pedagogy, Slavery
