My current project stems from my dissertation, Consuming the South: Representations of Taste, Place, and Agriculture, which emerged out of research on the ways that representations of agriculture have promoted produce and place in and beyond the American South since the late-nineteenth century. 

Examining advertisements, art, events, and objects surrounding North Carolina tobacco, Virginia peanuts, Florida oranges, and South Carolina rice, I explore how various stakeholders and communities constructed ideas of the region through its agricultural products. Within the project, I conceptualize "multisensory terroir" to examine the ways that representations encourage purchasers to both physically and culturally consume southern products. In so doing, I expand on the ways that terroir (a French term for taste of place, often used in relation to food and wine) offers a framework for understanding the experienced and imagined sensory qualities of representations of food as imagined proxies for place. By reconstructing how companies packaged their products for national buyers, my project strengthens the existing scholarship on foodways that focuses on visual and material culture. I also consider the localized lives of these products, examining how southerners creatively contributed to and contested the meanings associated with agricultural representations. Ultimately, I argue that southern agriculturally based promotional and commemorative processes revolved and, importantly, continue to revolve around the consumption of place itself.