Teresa Mares, Assistant Professor
- Ph.D., University of Washington, 2010
- Curriculum Vitae
Area of expertise
Research interests focus on sustainable food systems and food movements, Latino/a migration in the United States, environmental justice, and diet-related health disparities.
Contact Information
Email: Teresa MaresPhone:(802) 656-5706 Office Hours: Tuesday and Wednesday 1:30-3:00 or by appointment
Williams Hall, Room 501
Teresa Mares is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Vermont and is affiliated with the Transdisciplinary Research Initiative in Food Systems. She received her B.A. (Summa Cum Laude) in Anthropology and Foreign Languages and Literatures with a concentration in Spanish from Colorado State University (2002), and her M.A. (2005) and Ph.D. (2010) in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Washington. She also completed a graduate certificate in Women Studies at the University of Washington. Prior to coming to UVM, Dr. Mares was a Social and Behavioral Sciences Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Ohio State University.
Dr. Mares’ research focuses on the intersection of food and migration studies, and she is particularly interested in the ways that the diets and foodways of Latino/a immigrants change as a result of migration. Her dissertationWe Are Made of Our Food: Latino/a Immigration and the Practices and Politics of Eating investigated how the claims of Latino/a immigrants to food justice and food entitlements are made, reshaped, and denied in Seattle, Washington. Analytically, Dr. Mares engages with theories and concepts of citizenship and transnationalism, identity and foodways, and contemporary social movements. She is committed to applied, community-based ethnographic methodologies and is currently developing a new project on food access and food security among Latino/a dairy workers in Vermont.
Recent publications include a forthcoming article entitled “Here We Have the Food Bank”: Latino/a Immigration and the Contradictions of Emergency Food” in Food and Foodways, “Tracing Immigrant Identity Through the Plate and the Palate” in Latino Studies, Vol. 10.3 (2012), “Mapping the Food Movement: Addressing Inequality and Neoliberalism” (co-written with Alison Alkon) inEnvironment and Society: Advances in Research, Vol. 2 (2011); and a chapter entitled “Environmental and Food Justice: Toward Local, Slow, and Deep Food Systems” (co-written with Devon Peña) in the edited volumeCultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability(MIT Press 2011). During the 2012-2013 school year, Dr. Mares is teaching courses on Food, Culture, and Politics, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnographic Field Methods, and The Anthropology of Food and Gender.