Book Talk | Kate Brown | Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City
Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on Monday, April 6 (5:30-7:00 PM) for an event with Kate Brown. She will discuss her book, Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City, with Amy Bentley and Sophie Gonick.
Kate Brown is a Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at MIT and author of four previous prize-winning books, including A Manual for Survival, an NBCC Award finalist. She currently plants her gardens in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Vermont.
Amy Bentley is a 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 (California, 2014), (James Beard Award finalist, and ASFS Best Book Award). In 2024 she co-edited (with Fabio Parasecoli and Krishnendu Ray) the collection Practicing Food Studies (NYU). Other books include Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (University of Illinois, 1998), A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Age (editor) (Bloomsbury, 2011), and the co-edited volume (with Simona Stano) Food for Thought: Nourishment, Culture, Meaning (Springer, 2021) In addition to her work as a food historian, she is involved in a wide range of food-related academic and applied projects, including the Food and COVID-19 NYU digital archive, and as co-founder of the NYU Urban Farm Lab and the Experimental Cuisine Collective (2007-2016). Her work with a multi-disciplinary team on the project, Co-Creating an Implementation Strategy for Climate-Smart Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture to Improve Dietary Health and Reduce Non-Communicable Disease Risk in Tamale, Ghana, for which she received an NYU Climate Change Seed Grant, takes her research in new directions.
Sophie Gonick is an urbanist and associate professor in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis at NYU. She studies housing, immigration, urban social movements, and radical electoral politics. Her first book, Dispossession and Dissent: Immigrants and the Struggle for Housing in Madrid, explores the role of housing markets and their failures in shaping immigrant urban life and its modes of inclusion and contestation. She works extensively with grassroots collectives in Spain and the United States, including the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH-Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca) and Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi. Her new research examines rising housing unaffordability and immigration against histories of (dis)investment and discrimination within the urban United States.