Jane is a cultural historian specialising in food history and utopian politics. Following a successful business career she completed her PhD at King’s College London and now works an independent consultant, writer and educator. A visiting research fellow at KCL, Jane was their Mount Vernon Fellow in 2018. Passionate about communicating with audiences outside the academy, she regularly delivers workshops and lectures for cultural institutions bringing this creative, accessible approach to her teaching. She was a Delfina Foundation Associate Artist in 2016, co-founder of Edible Utopia, an artists’ growing co-operative at Somerset House, London (2016-21), and guest curator of ‘Feeding the 400’, a food exhibition for the Foundling Museum, London (2016-17), winning funding from the Wellcome trust. Jane is chair and trustee of the Sophie Coe Prize in food history and a trustee of the Oxford Food Symposium. She was born in Wales, grew up in Scotland, and has been resident in London for more than 3 decades where she serves as a magistrate.
Selected Publications
“Plants as Staple Foods” in A Cultural History of Plants in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Jennifer Milam, 25-50. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.
“Stranger than Fiction: the Reality and Fantasy of Eating in Space” in Cosmos as a Journal 2021 (2), ed. Julijonas Urbonas, 94-100. Vilnius: Lithuanian Culture Institute, 2021.
Food, Politics & Society: Social Theory and the Modern Food System. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. (co-authored with Alex Colas, Jason Edwards, and Sami Zubaida).
"Charles Fourier Versus the Gastronomes: The Contested Ground of Early Nineteenth Century Consumption and Taste." Utopian Studies 26, no. 1 (2015): 41-57.
