Hi all,
I just finished the third year of my PhD in American Studies at New York University. My dissertation intends to be a genealogy of 18th century fermentation in the British, Spanish, and early-American Greater Caribbean. How did different sciences (natural history, tropical medicine, plantation chemistry, black ritual practice, fugitive science) variously interact with and codify fermentation and its perhaps related processes: decay, putrefaction, rot, and preservation? What was the relationship, for instance, between fermentation on early-capitalist slave plantations where sugar and indigo were made and fermentation in eighteenth-century medicine's theorizing of putrefying matter in the body? As for the summer school: what form of life/death is fermentation and preservation? These are some of my questions...
See you at the beach!
Justin