Susan Pinkard is a Teaching Professor Emerita in the History Department of Georgetown University in Washington, DC and a former Associate Dean and Director of the Undergraduate Studies in Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. She holds a Ph.D. in European history from the University of Chicago where she developed a dual focus on the history of ideas and the history of material culture in the early modern Atlantic World. Her book, A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2009) examined the emergence of modern French habits of cooking, eating, and drinking that broke with ancient culinary traditions and created the foundations of classic French cuisine, a process that reflected shifting ideas about the relationship between human beings and nature and the links between diet, health, and gastronomic pleasure as well as new forms of sociability. Her current book project explores the Afro-British roots of American cooking, a culinary trajectory that reinvented many elements of ancient and medieval cooking in a radically different context.