I am a full-time Genealogy Librarian and part-time Ph.D. student in History at the University of North Texas focusing on the American colonial and Revolutionary periods. My interest in food studies came about after taking Dr. Jennifer Jensen Wallach's graduate class on Food and Identity in American History, which inspired my UNT Master's thesis, "Hungering for Independence: The Relationship Between Food and Morale in the Continental Army, 1775-1783 (2016)." This work argued that between the three supply systems initiated by the Continental Congress to keep the army fed, it was actually the soldiers' foraging techniques that were most successful, even though this was not truly a system. The thesis was about food supply and morale.

My dissertation will take a different tack: it will be about soldiers' provincialism against the continental scope of the American war through the lens of food. I'll be considering the tension between Continental Army soldiers' provincialism and the continental scope of the American Revolution by investigating soldiers' relationships with unfamiliar foods throughout the North American colonies during that conflict. I'm going to couch this investigation within other historians' works on soldier provincialism, and then fit it into the wider debate on a growing sense of nationhood before and during the war versus continued provincialism during and after the war. I argue that exposure to these foreign foodways broadened Continental Army soldiers' horizons and created in them an understanding of nationhood.