Food, Design, and Designers: Making Sense of Emerging Practices
Fabio Parasecoli is a 2014-15 GIDEST Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Food Studies Program at The New School for Public Engagement whose work concentrates on the intersections of food, media, and politics. Deeply involved in the international food studies movement, he is program advisor at Gustolab, a center for food and culture in Rome, and a member of the advisory board for the MA program in Food Systems at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Barcelona.
Born in Rome, Professor Parasecoli is a former correspondent who covered politics and East Asian cultures in Asia and the Middle East and subsequently worked for many years as the U.S. correspondent for Gambero Rosso, Italy's authoritative food and wine magazine. His current research focuses on assessing the potential of applied sociosemiotics, which explores issues such as the connections between connotations and ideological systems; the distribution of patterns of signification across time, space, and social groups; and the relevance of social tensions, negotiations, and conflicts in the creation of meaning as a tool for the ethnographic observation of designers, architects, and other actors in food design.
Professor Parasecoli is the author of several books, including Food Culture in Italy (2004), Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture (2008), and a six-volume A Cultural History of Food (edited with Peter Scholliers, 2012). He is also the author of the just-published, Al Dente: A History of Food in Italy (2014).