The Sweet Taste of Empire
| Dates: | 12 February 2026 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Talk |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Adults, Alumni, Current University students |
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Please join us for the next EACW Research Seminar, “The Sweet Taste of Empire,” featuring Professor Kim F. Hall (Barnard College) in conversation with Dr. Fred Schurink (EACW), discussing Professor Hall’s new book, The Sweet Taste of Empire.
The seminar will take place on Thursday 12 February, from 4–5 pm, in Sam Alex SG.16.
About the Speaker
Prof. Hall’s research and teaching cover Renaissance/Early Modern Literature and Culture, Critical Race Theory, Black Feminist Studies, Slavery Studies, Visual Culture, Food Studies, and Digital Humanities. Her first book, Things of Darkness (Cornell UP, 1996), used a black feminist approach to interpret Renaissance literature and helped generate a new wave of scholarship on race in Shakespeare and Renaissance/Early Modern texts. Her second book, Othello: Texts and Contexts (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2006) offers readers visual and verbal textual materials that illuminate themes in Shakespeare’s play Othello: The Moor of Venice. Her new book, Sweet Tastes of Empire (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), explores how the unique emphasis the English placed on confections as a marker of status and national identity offered a framework for grappling with changing notions of race, gender, labor, and domesticity that shaped early colonization. Tracing the literal and literary uses of sugar in seventeenth-century England, Hall shows how literary genres associated with gastronomic and aesthetic pleasure shaped representations of Caribbean colonization and slavery, developing a culinary language that functioned as a discourse of pleasure and white innocence.
We hope you can join us for what promises to be a fascinating discussion.
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
SG.16
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
