This seventh edition of the Umbra Institute’s biennial Food Conference entitled, “Ecologies of Food”, will be held from June 11-14, 2026, in Perugia, Italy.
The Keynote speaker will be Amy Bentley (PhD in American Civilization, University of Pennsylvania), Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. A 2024-25 NYU Humanities Fellow and 2024 NYU Distinguished Teaching Award recipient, she is a historian with interests in the social, historical, and cultural contexts of food. Books include Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet (2014), (James Beard Award finalist, and ASFS Best Book Award); Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (1998); and the co-edited volume Practicing Food Studies (2024). Current projects include a history of food in US hospitals, the cultural contexts of food waste, and an assessment of how historians write about food. 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).
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). She serves as a board member for the Bloomsbury Food Library, the Cornell University HEARTH Collection, the book series Food and Society: New Directions (Bristol University Press) and the journals Food and Foodways, Graduate Journal of Food Studies and Gastronomy.
