Mark Swislocki
Assistant Professor of History:
History
Phone: +1 401 863 3405
Mark_Swislocki@brown.edu
Mark Swislocki's research focuses on cultural history in China. His work examines such topics as the importance of food culture to urbanization, cultural factors shaping ideas about healthy eating, and the role that animals play in the formation of human communities and cross-cultural or international relations.
Biography
Mark Swislocki earned his PhD at Stanford University in 2002 and has been on the History faculty since 2003, following a postdoctoral fellowship at the Society of Fellows at Columbia University. His research interests are in cultural history in China. He is the author of Culinary Nostalgia: Regional Food Culture and the Urban Experience in Shanghai (Stanford, 2008), and he is currently engaged in research on the history of human-animal relations.
Interests
Mark Swislocki's research focuses on cultural history in China. His main research project is a book, Culinary Nostalgia: Food and Cultural Memory in Shanghai. This book argues that food culture was intrinsic to how the Chinese connected to the past, lived in the present, and imagined a future. It focuses on the city of Shanghai—a food lover's paradise—in order to show how tastes changed at pivotal moments in Chinese history since the nineteenth century. Looking at how the Chinese in Shanghai thought about food reveals how they viewed their relationships to other places, whether to other regions of China or to the western world. Individual chapters thus focus on such topics as: the proliferation of regional restaurants serving immigrant communities; Chinese-style western food fads; and efforts of the socialist government to train chefs in standardized national cuisine. This study illustrates how foodways helped the Chinese in Shanghai construct their own particular notions of modernity, thereby producing counter-narratives to the potentially homogenizing forces of westernization, nationalism, and socialism.
Degrees
MA, History; PhD, History.
Awards
Mellon Fellow, 2001-2003
Affiliations
N/A
Funded Research
Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities, 2000-2001, $18,500.00.
Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Center, 1999-2000, $17,500.
Committee on Scholarly Communication with China, Dissertation Research Fellowship, administered by the American Council of Learned Societies, 1998-1999, $13,500.
