Faculty

R. Claire Bunschoten, Ph.D.

Visiting Assistant Professor

Email: cbunschoten@skidmore.edu

  
Claire Bunschoten is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of American Studies at Skidmore College, where she teaches courses on food, the body, and the environment. Claire holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in American studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a B.A. in history and American studies from Bard College. 
 
Claire’s research and teaching interests take up issues of consumption, especially the entanglement of food, culture, and power in the modern United States. Claire is currently at work on her first book, which tells the story of how vanilla has come to serve as a code for social norms. Her writing has appeared in Food and Foodways, The Recipes Project, and Aeon, among other outlets. She has also contributed to several digital humanities projects, including the National Humanities Center’s podcast “Nerds in the Woods.”
 
As a teacher, her goal is to help students develop creative, critical thinking skills and equip them with a capacious methodological toolkit with which they may ask and answer questions about the United States as it affects them, their communities, and the world more broadly. Her courses often center the seemingly commonplace to help train students to be curious about the objects that populate their everyday lives. Some of Claire’s undergraduate courses include Introduction to American Studies: Eating in America, Material Culture Methods: The American Pie, Diet Culture, and Material Worlds: Treasure, Trash, and the Environment.
 
Before her time at Skidmore, Claire served as the Abbott Lowell Cummings Postdoctoral Fellow in American Material Culture at Boston University and as a Mellon Research Fellow in the Food Humanities at the New York Botanical Garden. In her life before the academy, she was an assistant to Pulitzer Prize-nominated food writer Molly O’Neill.