Editor’s note: This is the fourth entry in a series on how historians—especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia—do the work of history. If you know of someone we should interview, or would like to be interviewed yourself, send an email with the subject line HOW I DO HISTORY to pitches@contingentmag.org.
Anny Gaul (@annygaul on Twitter and Instagram) is a historian of food and gender in the Arabic-speaking world with specializations in Moroccan and Egyptian history. Here’s how she does history.
What is your current position?
I’m a postdoctoral fellow (also called a “postdoc”) at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University. It’s a one-year appointment and I learned I received it about a year ago, in April 2019.
Tell our readers what a typical day of work is like for you. For starters, is there such a thing as a typical day for you?
I definitely don’t have a typical day, much as I’d like to be better about routine and structure. This semester I’m teaching, which tends to dictate the rhythm of my week. About half the days are focused on teaching and the other half on everything else. When I’m not teaching, I try to do either some writing or translating first thing in the morning, since that’s when I work best. I also try to respond to all of yesterday’s emails (I recommend the Yesterbox approach) on any given day to stay on top of the ever-increasing deluge of emails we all receive.
What does a “postdoc” do? Does it involve mostly research or teaching or a mix of both?
“What does a postdoc do” is something I have been figuring out all year. Not all postdoc positions are created equal, and I’m lucky mine gives me a lot of flexibility. My only firm requirements have been to give one public talk and teach one class. I was allowed to design and teach whatever class I wanted, which has been pretty great.
That said, mine is for one year, so in the most practical sense, having the postdoc means that I am paid and supported to be on the academic job market. Frankly, the kind of fellowship I have might be the best possible position to be in while applying for conventional academic jobs.1 I think that for those of us seeking jobs in academia, we should talk about postdocs more directly in these terms. I don’t think it diminishes the value of a postdoc to describe it that way, but it does clarify what a postdoc can offer in relation to other types of positions.
I spent a lot of fall 2019 rewriting a dissertation chapter as a journal article, which is currently in its final stages of revision before publication. I discussed the revised piece in my public talk at the Center for the Humanities in October and very quickly drafted my revisions so that I’d have a current writing sample for job applications and something “under review” for my job market CV.
I’m happy to share that I recently accepted an offer I’m really excited about in the Arabic program at the University of Maryland at College Park. I can’t imagine how I would have navigated the entire process, from application to campus visit, without the postdoc. I say this because as proud as I am of my work, I also acknowledge that I am one of the extremely lucky ones, and because we need to be explicit about the circumstances which render conventional academic jobs more and more unattainable.
Ready to feast on koshari in Port Said, Egypt.
What are you teaching right now?
Currently I’m teaching a course of my own design titled “Culinary History of the Modern Middle East & North Africa.” It’s designed as a history survey of the region—but all through various lenses connected to food and foodways. The class is organized both thematically and chronologically: after a brief overview of food and cuisine in the region starting with the rise of Islam, we’ve looked at colonialism, nationalism, and the relationship between food and modern identity. We’re currently delving into the final two units, one that’s kind of a cultural history of state food policies in Egypt and another looking at “global” Middle Eastern cuisine, which shows how food culture and history flies in the face of a lot of typical area studies categories.2
As a part of the course students are asked to analyze primary sources in a range of creative ways, and a lot of them have chosen to cook their way through historical recipes. Several have also written great pieces connecting the course material to their own food memories and experiences. You can see some of their incredible work here.
Where did you go to college and graduate school?
I went to college at Yale, where I was an interdisciplinary Humanities major, then did a joint MA/PhD at Georgetown. My graduate education was almost entirely interdisciplinary too, with strong language and area studies focuses. The work that I ended up doing and the mentors I had took me in a very historical direction, even though that wasn’t what I necessarily intended when I started the program. I’m happy things ended up the way they did, though, and that I was in a setting that allowed me to infuse my historical work with perspectives from literature, sociolinguistics, and anthropology along the way.
Equally important to my academic training was the time I spent in the region I was studying. Based on a great piece of advice I got early on in graduate school, I aimed to spend as much time learning in the Middle East & North Africa as I spent learning about the region at institutions in the U.S. I managed that through a mix of fellowships like the Fulbright and a Center for Arabic Study Abroad fellowship, both of which I did in between my MA & PhD coursework and my eighteen months of dissertation fieldwork. Obviously I benefited enormously from time spent in Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, and Lebanon, not only in terms of language learning and research, but because it gave me more opportunities to discuss my work with scholars, writers, friends, and colleagues outside the U.S.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about what historians do and how they work?
I think there’s sometimes a perception that historians only deal with books and papers or dead and dusty things, rather than living ideas, places, cultures, and people. Archival work is also “field” work; archivists and librarians are historical actors too; their labor makes ours possible and it doesn’t take place in a vacuum. State politics determine who can go where to study which documents and with what funding. The languages we learn to study certain materials are acquired in real-life contexts and in conversation with people often more expert in places we study than we are. For those of us who study the history of everyday life, objects like cooking utensils and spaces and landscapes also shape how we write about the past. “Doing history” entails tangible social and political engagements.
What were your research interests in graduate school? Was there a particular graduate school project that you were/are especially proud of?
I knew I was interested in something at the intersection of gender, culture, and politics, and it was only when several of my mentors realized I had an amateur-ish food blog that they began to nudge me towards food history as a way to merge all those interests into something new and exciting. That food blog gradually evolved into a place where I could test drive rough drafts of primary source analyses, close-read historical cookbooks, and try to understand the history of food by mastering the techniques required to make it.
I think what I value the most about the blog is that it grounds me with reminders of why I do the work that I do—I love making and eating food, and I love to write. It’s important to still have a reason to do those things for enjoyment and not get lost in the professional side of my work. Perhaps the work I’m proudest of on the blog are the posts resulting from the one Thanksgiving that I made my family taste test two different Egyptian duck recipes (one classical, one vernacular, so to speak) for research purposes.
Sitting down to eat in Alexandria, Egypt.
Besides being a historian of gender, you are also a historian of food. Tell us about food studies and give our readers a basis for how historians study food and what the study tells us about large concepts such as nationality, identity, class, gender, and modernity.
I’ve found that using a culinary lens to interpret the histories of gender, nationalism, and modernity is especially useful for comparative work, because it forces an attention to granular details that can point to key differences in the way that concepts like modern womanhood or national belonging played out in places like Egypt and Morocco on the level of the everyday.3
In the case of the Middle East, food history, within the larger field of food studies, offers great examples that force us to rethink assumptions that the region’s societies are “traditional” and that its cultural practices remain the same as they have been for hundreds or thousands of years. One of my students, for example, did a careful reading of a medieval cookbook to make the point that we shouldn’t assume that just because a medieval text has a recipe for a dish by the same name as a modern dish, that means the modern dish has been around for eight hundred years. We can’t assume that what is passed off as “traditional” today is part of some cultural essence that exists outside of history.
Looking for sources while book shopping in Cairo.
In the past, how have you developed your research projects?
To me, exciting primary sources are like shiny pennies. That’s always where I start. My first serious bit of food research stemmed from a spellbinding passage about a shopping trip in the One Thousand and One Nights (a collection of Middle Eastern folktales); my dissertation by a popular mid-twentieth century Egyptian cookbook everyone had heard of but nobody had written about. I think the best primary sources pose their own questions. From there I start planning archive trips and interviews and reading lists based on those questions.
One advantage of food studies being interdisciplinary is that I’ve felt free to use all kinds of different research methods. My own cliched take on food history methodology is that “food is both everywhere and nowhere in the archive,” so we have to get a bit creative when doing research. Sometimes that means visiting state and colonial archives which have helped me understand which ingredients or cooking fuels existed where and when, and what schoolgirls were being taught to cook in domestic science classes. But I’ve also analyzed novels, memoirs, and films to understand shifts in the values or attitudes connected to various cooking fuels or ingredients. I’ve found repairmen who still work on kerosene stoves and talked to Egyptian copper sellers about who still makes and buys old-fashioned copper pots and pans (in the case of Morocco, I consulted some great recent ethnographic work about coppersmiths there). And I’ve conducted about two dozen oral history interviews with home cooks, incorporating a heavy emphasis on participant observation and taking notes not only on food memories but discussions about food that took place within families while they were cooking and eating. All of that added up to an “archive of the kitchen” that I’m still drawing on to write and think with.
What’s the best piece of advice you have received about conducting research?
Sara Scalenghe, who’s a pathbreaking historian of disability in the Arab world, once advised me that when you’re working on a topic that is new or understudied you can’t worry about getting everything completely right (as if there is such a thing) on the first try. There’s no established set of archives or historiography you’re building on, and you’ll make some mistakes, and you have to accept that. I think of that advice often. It’s echoed in other commonly given advice about how the best dissertation is a finished dissertation and that no one “take” on a topic—book, article, paper—is ever going to be perfect. It’s all a work in progress.
What do you think is the toughest part of tackling a research project?
For me the hardest parts are starting the writing and finishing the writing. I enjoy planning and doing research, playing around with organizing and coding sources and evidence, creating outlines, dreaming up chapters and articles, and I like writing and revising. But the very start of a new writing project, when you have to define a topic and scope and just start writing, and the finishing of a writing project, when you have to decide that it’s as good as time allows and send it in to your committee or editor or journal—those are the hardest. I absolutely need deadlines to get things done for this reason, otherwise I’ll outline and revise and edit forever. I find conferences and other presentations really useful for that reason—they create some kind of accountability that forces me to sit down and just write.
You have been writing a blog for over a decade. Where can we find it and what is the most rewarding part of running it?
In its current iteration it’s called Cooking with Gaul. After college I spent two years living in Morocco, and when I returned to the U.S. I created the blog as an outlet both for cooking the Moroccan foods I missed eating and my new photography hobby (also, it was around the time that it seemed like everyone was starting a food blog, so in part I blame the zeitgeist). It slowly evolved into an outlet for my research, or perhaps more accurately, as the space where my particular approach to food research evolved into something that incorporated both historical evidence and an ethnographic, participant observation-driven approach to cooking and eating.
I think the most rewarding part is when posts take on a life of their own—something I love about writing short online essays is that they can be produced and shared so much more quickly and more widely than conventional peer-reviewed articles. And that often leads to new conversations and relationships. After writing a piece on the Egyptian-Circassian dish sharkasiyya and its appearance in a canonical Egyptian novel, the editor of the excellent site Arablit asked to rerun the piece there. Now I’m happy to count the editor as both a colleague and a friend. And I have to admit that I was particularly tickled when a new acquaintance at an academic workshop (another historian of Morocco) heard what I was working on and told me I should read a recent essay on bastila that was being widely shared among her network. Reader, the essay she recommended was my own!
On your website, you have a quote from postcolonial theory scholar Gayatri Spivak: “Translation is the most intimate act of reading.” Explain to us what that quote means to you and tell us about your translation work. For starters, which languages do you mostly work to translate?
I translate from Arabic to English and have done so professionally for nearly seven years now (I’ve been studying Arabic for going on seventeen years, for reference, and yes, I’ll always consider myself a student of the language). I mostly translate nonfiction—journal articles and shorter essays by activists and scholars, although I’ve done a bit of literary translation too. I want to add that translation has been an important source of income for me as a graduate student and early career scholar. My doctoral institution didn’t have summer funding, and so in between academic years I relied on paid translation work.
I had a professor in college point out that questions of what does or doesn’t get translated are analogous to questions of censorship, and that point has stayed with me. Who decides what is translated, who edits translations, who critiques them? I think many of us think about these questions when we work across languages or cultural contexts and it’s good to talk through them in graduate seminars or academic workshops.
This brings me back to the way Spivak discusses translation as an intimate form of engaging with a text. I think of intimacies as relationships that are negotiated, in process, never perfect, and so are translations. It follows that the best translations of texts are informed by familiarities and meaningful relationships with the language of the source text and the social and linguistic contexts of its society.
For me what that means is that often what I translate is driven by the choices, priorities, or suggestions of people whose mother tongue is the source language, or who are members of the communities that the work is coming from (not that those communities are monolithic groups, of course).
Shopping for used books in Marrakesh, Morocco
If money, time, and distance were not issues, what’s a dream project you’d love to tackle?
A longue durée history of Arabic cookbooks and recipes.4 Today you could probably write an equivalent account of any number of other culinary/linguistic traditions, but for the world of Arabic letters it would require years of archival and philological work.5
Scholars know there was a robust manuscript tradition of Arabic cookbooks in the medieval period (many of which are now available in translation), and then a genre of print Arabic cookbooks starting in the late 19th century. We know almost nothing about written recipes and cookbooks in Arabic between them. But there’s no reason to believe they don’t exist. The period in between these eras has been understudied in the fields of Arabic literature and history and Islamic studies in general. That has begun to change in other subfields, and so I think in the coming years there will be a clearer sense of what kinds of culinary literature may have been produced during that period. Locating those texts, creating critical editions, translating them, figuring out how they relate to contemporaneous recipes from elsewhere in the Islamicate world like the Safavid and Moghul empires—that will take a team of scholars and a lot of time and funding. But it will be fascinating and delicious!
If you weren’t a scholar, what kind of work do you think you’d be doing?
My dream is to open up an independent bookstore somewhere in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge mountains that specializes in cookbooks, food writing, and literature in translation. We’d have a bar serving cocktails and mocktails designed to evoke specific historical eras or scenes from literature, a few mild-mannered store pets wandering around, and cooking and writing workshops.
- Such as a tenure-track professor at a university or a permanent college instructor.
- Area studies typically refers to interdisciplinary fields of research and scholarship related to geographic or cultural regions. Area studies involve many different fields of study, including but not limited to history, political science, international relations, cultural studies, geography, anthropology, and literature.
- There is an abundance of French culinary history, but more work is needed on cuisines and food systems outside Western Europe and North America.
- The term longue durée refers to a way of doing history that prioritizes (sometimes very) long-term analysis of social structures and processes. It’s mostly associated with a group of 20th century French historians known as the Annales school.
- The study of language in literary texts as well as oral and written historical records.