Prof. Reddy and Guevarra receive LAS Dean’s Award for Faculty Research
Professors Gayatri Reddy and Anna Guevarra received a 2014-2015 LAS
Dean's Award for Faculty Research in the Humanities for their project,
"Bumbay Bingka: Culinary Crosscurrents and a Tale of Three Cities."
The project asks how a culinary dessert - bebinca/bingka/bibingka -
travels this wide swath of territory in South and Southeast Asia --
territory that was colonized by different European powers - Portuguese,
Dutch, and Spanish, respectively - each with their own, very different,
culinary and confectionary traditions? Using bingka as an intellectual
prism, this project tells a complex story of culinary "contact zones,"
using a new maritime optic, to produce a different rendering of global
history, migration, and culinary foodways in South and Southeast Asia.
Through archival research of convents and oral histories of confectioners
in Goa, India; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Rizal, Philippines- all areas
especially known for their bingka, the project will explore the spatial
and temporal configurations of global/local foodways using bingka's
multivalent culinary trajectories in South and Southeast Asia as the lens
through which to do so.