Elizabeth Engelhardt
Contact Information
UNC College of Arts and Sciences
Campus Box 3100
205 South Building
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3100
e.engelhardt@unc.edu
Education
Ph.D. Emory University, 1999.
M.A. Emory University, 1997.
B.A. Duke University, 1992.
Bio.
Elizabeth Engelhardt is Kenan Eminent Professor of Southern Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is also the Senior Associate Dean for Fine Arts and Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences. A scholar of southern and Appalachian food and culture, she is the author or editor of eight books, including her forthcoming Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America and the recent The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell: Contemporary Appalachian Tables.
I joined the Department of American Studies as the John Shelton Reed Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies in January 2015. I am the Senior Associate Dean for Fine Arts and Humanities in the College of Arts & Sciences. I co-direct the pan-university initiative, Southern Futures (https://southernfutures.unc.edu/). I am also the author or editor of The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South (2013, co-edited with John T. Edge and Ted Ownby), A Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food (2011), Republic of Barbecue: Stories Beyond the Brisket (2009), Beyond Hill and Hollow: Original Readings in Appalachian Women’s Studies (2005), The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature (2003), and The Power and the Glory: An Appalachian Novel (2003, a reprint of a 1910 novel by Grace MacGowan Cooke).
Throughout my research, I draw from letters, diaries, cookbooks, novels, photographs, government records, short stories, and material objects. I work to collect and build alternative archives as well, especially in terms of oral histories with living subjects and, increasingly, the seeds, heritage ingredients, tastes and even sounds of the communities with which I partner and whose stories I aim to help document. While my recent work has coalesced around the futures of the American South, my commitment to Appalachian studies and the power and possibility of region, race, gender, and class continues to motivate me as a scholar.