Join Stratford Hall’s Director of Collections and Visitor Engagement, Dr. Kelley Fanto Deetz, for a lecture on the history of sugar in the Atlantic world. Deetz discusses the cultural and political history of one of the most profitable crops in the colonial era. Focusing on material culture and culinary history, this lecture will highlight the role of enslaved laborers, abolitionists, and planters as they battled over this controversial ingredient.
Dr. Kelley Fanto Deetz is a historian and archaeologist, and works as the Director of Collections and Visitor Engagement at Stratford Hall and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of African American Studies at U.C. Berkeley. She holds a BA in Africana Studies and History from The College of William & Mary and an MA and Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of the critically acclaimed book Bound to the Fire: How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine, which was named as one of the top ten books on food of 2017 by the Smithsonian Magazine. You can find her most recent work in Audible’s The Great Courses on the History of Sugar, and her contribution to the forthcoming cookbook California Soul, with celebrity and OWN tv star Chef Tanya Holland and Alice Walker.