Simona Stano is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at the University of Turin (UNITO, Italy) and Visiting Researcher at New York University (NYU, US). She has been awarded a Marie Curie Global Fellowship for a research project (“COMFECTION”, 2019-2021) on the semiotic analysis of food communication. She also worked as Senior Researcher at the International Semiotics Institute (2015-2018) and as Visiting Researcher at the University of Toronto (2013), the University of Barcelona (2015-2016) and the “Observatorio de la Alimentación” (2015-2016). Dr. Stano deals mainly with semiotics of culture, food semiotics, body semiotics, and communication studies, and has published several papers, edited volumes (including special issues of top semiotic journals such as
Semiotica and
Lexia), and monographs (
I sensi del cibo, Aracne
, 2018;
Eating the Other. Translations of the Culinary Code, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015) on these topics. Since 2020, she is the vice-Director of the
Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Communication (CIRCe) of the University of Turin.
Amy Bentley is Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. A historian with interests in the social, historical, and cultural contexts of food, she is the author of Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet (University of California Press, 2014), which was a finalist for a James Beard Award, and also winner of the ASFS Best Book Award. Other publications include Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (University of Illinois, 1998), A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Era (editor) (Berg, 2011), as well as articles on such diverse topics as ketchup in Reagan's America, the politics of southwestern cuisine, and a historiography of food riots. In addition to her work as a food historian, she’s been involved in a wide range of food-related academic and applied projects, including as co-founder of the NYU Urban Farm Lab and the Experimental Cuisine Collective (2007-2016). The former Editor-in-Chief of Food, Culture, and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research (2013-2019), Bentley is co-editor of the book series Food in Modern History: Traditions and Innovations (Bloomsbury).
