Book talk: Ingredients of Change

Ingredients of Change explores modern Bulgaria's foodways from the Ottoman era to the present, outlining how Bulgarians domesticated and adapted diverse local, regional, and global foods and techniques, and how the nation's culinary topography has been continually reshaped by the imperial legacies of the Ottomans, Habsburgs, Russians, and Soviets, as well as by the ingenuity of its own people. Changes in Bulgarian cooking and cuisine, Mary C. Neuburger shows, were driven less by nationalism than by the circulation of powerful food narratives—scientific, religious, and ethical—along with peoples, goods, technologies, and politics.

About the speaker:

Mary Neuburger is a Professor of history, the Director of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES), and the Chair of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas (UT) of Austin. She is the author of three books on Bulgarian history: The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria (Cornell 2004). Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria (Cornell, 2012), and Ingredients of Change: The History and Culture of Food in Bulgaria (Cornell, 2022). Dr. Neuburger is also the co-editor with Paulina Bren of Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe (Oxford, 2012) and has authored numerous articles on Bulgarian history. She currently co-leads the Balkan Circle seminar series, which she inaugurated at UT, and is the co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary History.

The event will be chaired by Dr Piro Rexhepi.

This will be an in-person event.