Hi everyone!

I’m Rachel Herrmann, a historian who studies food and its absence. I work at Cardiff University, in Wales. My particular interests are Native American history, the American Revolution, and histories of slavery. You can read more about me on my website: https://rachelbherrmann.com/

In 2011 I wrote an article on cannibalism and the Starving Time in Jamestown for the scholarly journal the William and Mary Quarterly, which led to an edited collection on cannibalism with the University of Arkansas Press. I’m here with Kelly Watson today to talk about this collection with you. Here’s a description of that collection:

Long before the founding of the Jamestown, Virginia, colony and its Starving Time of 1609–1610—one of the most famous cannibalism narratives in North American colonial history—cannibalism played an important role in shaping the human relationship to food, hunger, and moral outrage. Why did colonial invaders go out of their way to accuse women of cannibalism? What challenges did Spaniards face in trying to explain Eucharist rites to Native peoples? What roles did preconceived notions about non-Europeans play in inflating accounts of cannibalism in Christopher Columbus’s reports as they moved through Italian merchant circles? Asking questions such as these and exploring what it meant to accuse someone of eating people as well as how cannibalism rumors facilitated slavery and the rise of empires, To Feast on Us as Their Prey posits that it is impossible to separate histories of cannibalism from the role food and hunger have played in the colonization efforts that shaped our modern world.

I’ve written the introduction and conclusion for this volume, as well as a chapter called “‘The Black People Were Not Good to Eat’: Cannibalism, Cooperation, and Hunger at Sea.” If you head over to the press page for To Feast on Us as Their Prey, you can click on the “contents” page to read the book’s introduction: https://www.uapress.com/product/to-feast-on-us-as-their-prey/ This is where I discuss the recent Jamestown findings, the state of cannibalism studies, and the contributions of each author in the collection. My chapter is about slave narratives and abolitionist texts and how they offer us lots of different ways to think about hunger, violence, and cooperation in the late eighteenth century.

Dr. Watson has written a chapter for the collection, but she’s also written her own book about the subject: https://nyupress.org/books/

We’re looking forward to your questions!