Emily Martin

PhD Student

North America


Photo of Emily Martin, wearing a grey dress and standing in front of a green background

I am a second year PhD student interested in the intersection of the history of food and medicine in US History. Currently, I am working on a project on food activism durring the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. I am interested in how food activism joins together knowledge about food as a form medicine with a distinctively queer approach to caregiving, joining together histories of Regean-era care politics with histories of queer domesticity and more traditional histories of medicine. 

I am interested more broadly in how food serves as a site of medical knowledge production for "non-elites" in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and have also worked in Irish immigrant foodways durring cholera and typhus and typhoid outbreaks in the mid to late nineteenth century. I am interested in food as both an intimate artifact of the everyday and marker of community formation, and as a site of medicalization, health and wellness. I earned my B.A. in history and classics from Wellesley College in 2021, and I continue to dabble in histories of food and medicine in the ancient mediterranean. 

Research Interests 

  • Food history
  • History of medicine 
  • Gender and sexuality studies
  • Immigration history 
  • Science and technology studies

Fellowships and Awards 

2021 Oxford Food Symposium Rising Scholar 

2021 Edna V. Moffett Fellow