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Dr. Farha Ternikar, is Professor and Director of the Women’s Studies Program at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. She teaches  Gender and Society, Food and Culture,  and Gender and Feminist theory. She has authored several articles on gender, race and religious identity in the Journal of Ethnic Studies, International Journal of Contemporary Sociology, and Sociology Compass. Her most recent book , Beyond Halal and Hijab, uses the lens of intersectionality to examine how food in addition to social media and wardrobes are important aspects of consumption and identity for Muslim immigrant women. She has also authored “Intersectionality and the Halal kitchen” in  Feminist Food Studies (Canadian Women’s Press/ Ed. Elaine Power) and “the Halal kitchen” in  Critical Food Studies (Ed. Donna Andrews). Her newest project explores the significance of “halal” biryani for  Muslim immigrant communities but also as a reflection of the political climate in India through recipes, auto-ethnography and participant-observation with Muslim Indian immigrant women. Dr. Ternikar sits on the board of the Association for the Study of Food and Society.

Dr. Stephanie Y. Evans, is a Professor of Black Women's Studies in the Institute for Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University. She served as a department chair for twelve years at Georgia State University, Clark Atlanta University, and University of Florida. Her research interest is Black women's #HistoricalWellness, intellectual history, memoirs, and mental health. She is author of three books: Black Women's Yoga History: Memoirs of Inner Peace (SUNY, 2021); Black Passports: Travel Memoirs as a Tool for Youth Empowerment (SUNY, 2014), and Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850-1954: An Intellectual History (UF, 2007) as well as lead co-editor of four books including, Black Women and Public Health: Strategies to Name, Locate, and Change Systems of Power (SUNY 2022) and Black Women's Mental Health: Balancing Strength and Vulnerability (SUNY Press, 2017). She is the curator of the Oldways Africana Soup in Stories (OASIS) collection that explores soup narratives in the African Diaspora. Her current research examines Black women’s tea history in the African Diaspora. 

Dr. Meredith Abarca is Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso. Professor Abarrca defines herself as “a child of the kitchen.” She writes, "I grew up in restaurants, for a while I thought of becoming a professional chef, and then one day I found myself getting a Ph.D. and writing about the transformative power that food holds in all of our lives. Since then, I’ve continued to research and write about this power in Voices in the Kitchen (2006); Rethinking Chicana/o Literature Through Food: Postnational Appetites (2013), Latin@s’ Presence in the Food Industry: Changing How We Think about Food (2016), and in numerous articles in scholarly journals and edited collections. Through lectures and workshops, I’ve had opportunities of sharing the social, cultural, historical and philosophical complex dynamics that food plays in our lives in places like the Southern Foodways Alliance Symposium in Oxford, Mississippi; the University of Gastronomical Sciences in (Colormo) Parma, Italy; the University of Technology in Sidney, Australia; the University of Paris-Sorbonne, France; the University of Oslo, Norway; the University of Toronto, Canada, and numerous US academic settings.