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About Me

Carla Cevasco is a scholar of food, the body, material culture, gender, and race in early America. She is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Rutgers University. Her first book, Violent Appetites: Hunger in the Early Northeast (Yale University Press, 2022), explores how Indigenous peoples and colonial invaders confronted hunger in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is working on a second book about feeding infants and children in early America. She received a Ph.D. in American Studies and an A.M. in American History from Harvard University, and a B.A. in English and American Literatures from Middlebury College.  Her articles have appeared in Early American Studies, New England Quarterly, and Journal of Early American History. Her public scholarship has been featured in The Junto, Common-Place, Nursing Clio, and The Recipes Project. She is a former editor of the Graduate Journal of Food Studies.

Recent Publications

“‘Nothing which hunger will not devour’: Disgust and Sustenance in the Northeastern Borderlands,” Early American Studies 19, No. 2 (Spring 2021): 264-293.

“COVID-19 Didn’t Break the Food System. Hunger Was Already Here,” Nursing Clio, May 26, 2020.

“‘Look’d Like Milk: Colonialism and Infant Feeding in the English Atlantic World,” Journal of Early American History 10, No. 2-3 (2020): 147-178. 

“Hunger Knowledges and Cultures in New England’s Borderlands, 1675-1770,” Early American Studies 16, No. 2 (April 2018): 255-281, doi:10.1353/eam.2018.0009

Media Coverage

Social Media

@cevasco_carla

Country Focus

United States

Expertise by Geography

British Isles, North America, United States

Expertise by Chronology

17th century, 18th century, Early Modern

Expertise by Topic

Children & Youth, Colonialism, Family, Food History, Gender, Indigenous Peoples, Material Culture, Medicine, Public History, Race, Rural & Agrarian History, Women