Professor of English Jennifer Cognard-Black will present The Robert Foster Cherry Lecture “Just Food: Social Justice and the Literatures of Food” on Thursday, Oct. 10 at 8 p.m. in Cole Cinema, Campus Center. The lecture is presented by the Office of the Provost.
The Cherry Lecture is a result of Cognard-Black being selected as a finalist for Baylor University’s 2020 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching. Cognard-Black also received $15,000, as well as $10,000 for her St. Mary’s College department to foster the development of teaching skills. Along with this lecture, she will present a series of lectures at Baylor during fall 2019.
With “Just Food: Social Justice and the Literatures of Food,” Cognard-Black considers how the literatures of food—poems, essays, and novels with recipes—can awaken readers to issues of food justice, especially in the classroom. This participatory presentation also demonstrates how students of food justice can move from words to the world, engaging service-learning projects with community partners to address food inequities and environmental degradation sometimes concealed by mainstream discourse. Ultimately, these examples show how honest and fearless food stories can help create more ethical eaters.
The Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching is the only national teaching award – with the single largest monetary reward of $250,000 – presented by a college or university to an individual for exceptional teaching. Three finalists have been selected with the winning professor to be announced by Baylor in spring 2020.
