Scott Barton

Biography

Scott Alves Barton teaches Food, Environmental & Cultural Studies, Writing, Anthropology with a focus on Race, Ethnicity and Global Cultures at NYU, The New School, Pace University in the CUNY college system, and has been a culinary instructor at the Institute for Culinary Education. Scott Alves Barton is a 2021-2022 Faculty Fellow in the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies. And he is the inaugural Fellow in Notre Dame’s Initiative for Race and Resilience, where Scott engages with African Diaspora food and foodways to interrogate issues and questions of race, equity and the politics of identity. Scott’s research and manuscript project, Feeding the Gods: Sacred Nagô Culinary Religious Culture in Northeastern Brazil, is based on a decade of research in Afro-Brazilian communities. Scott’s research, films and publications focus on the intersection of secular and sacred cuisine as a marker of identity politics, cultural heritage, political resistance, women’s labor and knowledge, and self-determination in Northeastern Brazil.

Scott's publications focus on cooking, culinary history, food and faith, Candomblé and Tambor de Mina religious rituals, and rites of passage. A sampling of Scott’s publications includes several book chapters, journal articles, podcasts and short films including "Repasting: A Metonymy," "A Book by Another Name Would Also Be Legible: The Limits of the Bibliography of African American Cookbooks,” "Food for the Gods-Ewé òòò, á sà, Elogiar as folhas—Praise the leaves," "Now You’re Eating Slave Food!—A Genealogy of Feijoada, Race and Nation," "Why We Eat the Food We Eat: Mothers"; "Drinking On The Job — DOTJ with John Coyle"; "Melegueta, or Grains of Paradise: To be ‘pepperish’ at the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery 2020." "A Book by Another Name Would Also Be Legible: The Limits of the Bibliography of African American Cookbooks,”, "The Book Club of California Quarterly—Winter 2020"; and "Black Food Professionals, Part 1 | Black Food Professionals, Part II." 

During his 25-year tenure as an executive chef, restaurant/product consultant, and culinary educator, Scott was named one of the top 25 best African/African American chefs by Ebony Magazine. Scott is on the board of the Association for the Study of Food and Society, the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, the co-chair of the African Diaspora Religions Committee of the American Academy of Religion, is a member of the James Beard Foundation Cookbook Awards committee, and an advisor to the Indigo Arts Alliance. Scott has been a fellow at the Instituto Sacatar, and Fundação Palmares in Brazil, the Institute for Critical Investigation at Vanderbilt University, Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas, Mexico and he is an ongoing fellow at Lynden Sculpture Garden, in Milwaukee.