Carla Cevasco

Carla Cevasco is a scholar interested in food, the body, gender, and race in early America and beyond. She is Associate Professor of American Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. 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, Young and Hungry, a history of feeding infants and children in the United States. Her scholarship has appeared in Early American Studies, New England Quarterly, Art History, and Journal of Early American History. Her public writing has been featured in The Atlantic, TIME, Lapham’s Quarterly, Nursing Clio, Common-Place, The Junto, and The Recipes Project.

Publications:

• “A Mixture of Nations: English Captive Children and Food in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast,” in Engaging Children in Vast Early America, edited by Julia Gossard and Holly White (Routledge, 2024).

• “What Parents Did Before Baby Formula,” The Atlantic (online), https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/baby-formula-breastfeeding-history/629889/

• Violent Appetites: Hunger in the Early Northeast (Yale University Press, 2022).

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• “Feeding Children and Empires in the Early American Northeast,” James Ford Bell Lecture, James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota, November 20, 2024

• “Why Does Early American Hunger Matter Now?,” Theodore H. Fossieck Lecture in Early American History, SUNY-Albany History Department, November 13, 2023

• "'Look’d Like Milk’: The Politics and Perils of Feeding Infants in America Before 1900,” Panel discussion on “Milk,” Politics of Food and Drink speaker series, British, Irish, and Empire Studies Program, University of Texas at Austin, October 11, 2022 (virtual)

Accomplishments:

• Runner-Up, 2023 Shapiro Book Prize, The Huntington

Upcoming Projects:

• Young and Hungry: A History of Feeding Children in America

• Editor of special issue of Global Food History, “Empires of Disgust” (anticipated Winter 2024).

My current book project, Young and Hungry, is a history of children’s food in the United States, told through the lenses of race, gender, and colonization. The book argues that children’s hunger in the United States has always had roots in racial injustice.