[About a month ago Vaughn and I had the chance to attend and present at the 57th Northeast Modern Language Association Convention, held this year in Pittsburgh. So as I’ve done with almost every NeMLA conference for the last decade-plus (I wasn’t able to attend last year’s), I wanted to recap some of the stand-out moments here, leading up to a special weekend post on why this organization matters more than ever in 2026!]
Quick takeaways from the four papers on Vaughn’s panel, the third in a series on cultural representations of food & famine.
- Vaughn on Christmas Carols: I’ve written a good bit in this space about both Vaughn’s first book on Hollywood Christmas films & her idea for a second project on nostalgia. So it was particularly fun to get to listen to Vaughn connect those two projects through a talk on how the representations of holiday feasts in three film adaptations of Dickens’s Christmas classic—and, even more importantly, how audiences remember those representations—can help us think about food, film, nostalgia, and more. Watch this space for more on that nostalgia project as it develops, natch!
- Lindsay Muir on the Irish Famine: One of the really interesting things about this session was the back and forth between feasts and famines as main focal points for the papers, and so from Vaughn’s Christmas feasts the conversation moved to Queen’s University grad student Lindsay’s analyses of both the 1840s Irish Famine itself and the representations of it in two recent cultural works (the 2019 film Arracht [Monster] and the 2025 TV series House of Guinness). I’ve long been interested in the question of how we represent our hardest histories, and these two texts allowed Lindsay to consider that question thoughtfully.
- Alyssa Bobich on Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998): The discipline of food studies also opens up to very different cultural and social question, of course, and certainly in the 21st century many of those questions rightly revolve around meat and the meat industry. I had heard of Ozeki’s novel and its satirical lens on those questions (as well as on the early period of reality TV among other topics), but haven’t had a chance to read it, so I very much appreciate Alyssa’s analyses, and especially her take on how the novel can help us consider the overlapping commodifications of meat and women respectively.
- Sara Dorsten on Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1880): Every one of the papers on this session took its throughlines in distinct directions, and Sara’s concluding paper was no different—reexamining the beloved 19th century Swiss children’s story through the lens of food, and more exactly how the world around its youthful protagonist reveals the ongoing effects of industrialization on every aspect of life, including food. One of the best parts of NeMLA is how much every session I’ve ever attended has helped me to think in new and exciting ways about seemingly familiar subjects, and Sara’s concluding paper on this excellent section was a perfect case in point.
Next recap tomorrow,
Ben
PS. If you were at the conference, feel free to share your thoughts too!
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