Rebecca Earle teaches history at the University of Warwick. Her research has investigated aspects of Spanish American cultural and political history, and particularly the nature of identity, memory and embodiment. Lately she has developed a particular interest in the cultural significance of food and eating. Her most recent monograph, The Body of the Conquistador (Cambridge, 2012), which won the 2013 Bolton-Johnson Prize, explored the centrality of food to the construction of colonial space, and the ‘racial’ categories that underpinned it. She is currently writing a history of the potato, which uses the emergence of the potato as an Enlightenment super-food to explore the connections between everyday life and new ideas of individualism, political economy and the state.

Keywords: histories of food, clothing, race, nationalism, colonial Spanish America, cannibalism, colonialism, potatoes.