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Sara Franklin

Part-time Faculty
sf1563@nyu.edu
619 - 1 Wash Pl

Office Hours
Monday 12:00 TO 2:00 (BY APPT)

B.A., Community Health, Tufts University, 2008
Ph.D., Food Studies, New York University, 2016

Sara Franklin is an oral historian and journalist whose work focuses on food and agriculture and its ties to popular culture, media, performance of gender, care and identity. Her areas of interest include examining food and agriculture through the lenses of food, memory, oral history, narrative studies, dialogical analysis, embodied knowledge and skill, media studies, care work, domesticity and include forms of storytelling including biography/profile, memoir, autoethnography, and audio production. Sara has a background in sustainable agriculture, anti-hunger activism, hands-on food production, food journalism and food-related education and capacity building. She seeks to bring diverse storytelling and analysis tools to bear on the the universal topic of food in order to help frame it in both contemporary and historical contexts. Her doctoral research is based in oral history and uses methods drawn from several disciplines to examine the life of Knopf senior editor Judith Jones with special attention to her impact on conceptions of womanhood and self, cooking in the public sphere, and American food culture and culinary publishing. She has farmed in Massachusetts and New York, has spent time working with agricultural and culinary activists in South Africa and Brazil, and was an assistant content manager for the "Our Global Kitchens" exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History (2012-2013).  She has written, produced multi-media and conducted interviews for a number of print and online publications including Cook 'n Scribble, ZesterDaily, Gastronomica, Global Post, Southern Cultures, The Valley Advocate, Guernica, Freerange Non-Fiction, Downeast.com, Diner Journal, Gravy, and Brooklyn-Based. She edited the collection Edna Lewis: At the Table with an American Original, which is forthcoming from UNC Press in April 2019.  

Grants & Fellowships

2020

Franklin NEH Public Scholars Grant

Sara Franklin was awarded a 2020 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Grant for research and writing leading to a biography of American cookbook and literary editor Judith Jones for her project The Life and Work of Judith Jones, the 20th-Century Editor Who Changed the Way America Cooked, Ate, and Read.

Teaching and Research Interests

food  memory  oral history  narrative studies  dialogical analysis  embodied knowledge and skill  agriculture  food and media  care work  domesticity  biography  memoir  autoethnography  critical reporting  audio production 

Recent News

PUBLICATIONS

Sara Franklin edited Edna Lewis: At The Table with an American Original (UNC Press, 2018).

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

In March 2015, Professor Sara Franklin spoke at the "History After Hours" series at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institute. In June 2015, Professor Franklin gave a paper on Edna Lewis and Judith Jones at the Southern Association for Women Historians.

 

Sara Franklin