Prof Desiree Lewis
Desiree Lewis is a professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape, and the lead Principal Researcher of the Mellon-funded intra-university “Critical Food Studies Programme”. She has taught at the Universities of Cape Town, the University of Kwazulu-Natal and the University of the Witwatersand. She has been a visiting professor and guest researcher at sites including the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town (Visiting Professor in 2018 and 2019) , Ruhr University, Germany (Marie Jahoda Visiting Professor in 2017), the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Scholarship (Research Fellow), the University of Georgia State (Fulbright scholar-in-residence in Women’s and Gender Studies and Literature Departments) and the Nordic African Institute Uppsala, Sweden (guest researcher).
A transdisciplinary feminist academic, Lewis studied at the University of Cape Town, Witwatersrand University and the University of York. Her research interests have included literary and cultural studies, the politics of feminisms, work on gender and sexualities, and, most recently, humanities-oriented food studies. She is the author of Bessie Head and the Politics of Imagining(2007) and has guest edited special journal issues dealing with feminisms, representations of the body, and sexuality and commodity culture.
Her recent work seeks to explore and expand the diversity of knowledge-making about human and social experiences through relationships to food. She is also interested in understandings of food and the human that are embedded in visuality, memory, oral history, popular culture and indigenous knowledges.
