Carrie Helms, Ph.D.

• Texas Christian University: Women and Gender Studies Graduate Research Award (2014)

ORGANIZATIONS

• American Studies Association
• MLA
• Southern Foodways Alliance

CERTIFICATIONS

• Texas Christian University: Graduate Certificate in Women and Gender Studies
• Texas Christian University: Graduate Certificate in New Media Composing and Teaching

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

• Unpalatable: Pleasure and Pain in Southern Cookbooks, University Press of Mississippi (January 2025)
• “Queer Hunger, Feeding, and Eating in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” Significant Food: Critical Readings to Nourish American Literature. Edited by Jeff Birkenstein and Robert C. Hauhart. University of Georgia Press, 2024.
• “Mapping the Imagined South in Contemporary Southern Cookbooks.” Special Issue: Digital Souths, Southern Quarterly. (November 2022).
• “The Chef Goes to the Slaughterhouse: Animal Pain and Ethical Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks.” Food, Culture, and Society. (September 2021).
• Co-authored with Amanda Milian and Heidi Hakimi-Hood. “Cookery and Copyright: A History of One Cookbook in Three Acts.” Gastronomica. (November 2019).
• “It’s Southern, but More”: Southern Citizenship in the Global Foodscape of Garden & Gun.” Southern Quarterly. 56.1 (Fall 2018): 147-163.
• Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine the South, University of Arkansas Press (August 2018)
• “Dirt.” The Texas Review. Fall/Winter 2010.
• “Home.” The Texas Review. Fall/Winter 2010.
• “The Fire.” Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. Spring/Summer 2010.
• “‘Squirrel, If You’re So Inclined’: Recipes, Narrative, and the Rhetoric of Southern Identity.” Food, Culture, and Society. (Dec 2014)
• “Food Chain.” Entropy. 28 September 2015.
• “Dinner.” Entropy. 16 November 2015.
• “'Acting it Out Like a Play': Flipping the Script of Kitchen Spaces in Faulkner’s Light in August.” Southern Quarterly. 53.2 (Winter 2016): 58-73
• “Writing Culture: A Feminist Historiography of Recipe Origin Narratives.” Food, Feminisms, and Rhetorics. Ed. Melissa Goldthwaite. Southern Illinois University Press. (June 2017)
• “Copying and Copyright: The Recipe Text as Offal.” Offal: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. Co-authored with Amanda Milian and Heidi Hakimi-Hood. (June 2017)
• Co-Author Sarah Ruffing Roberts, “Gathering Around Hull-House Dining Tables,” American Studies. 57.3 (2018): 11-38.
• Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine the South, University of Arkansas Press (August 2018)
• “’A New Confederacy’: The Economy of Southern Hospitality in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary.” Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde. Eds. Keel Geheber, Jessica Martell, and Adam Fajardo. (February 2019, University of Florida Press)
• “It’s Southern, but More”: Southern Citizenship in the Global Foodscape of Garden & Gun.” Southern Quarterly. 56.1 (2019).

SELECTED PRESENTATIONS

• KEYNOTE: Foodways of the Greater Gulf. Greater Gulf Symposium, Lamar University. March 2025.
• KEYNOTE: “Continuing Bonds: Funeral Cookbooks and Gifts of Food for the Living in the US South.” International Food as Gift Conference; Krakow Poland. October 2023.
• “Imagining Micro-Regions in Southern Cookbooks.” Panel: Many Souths, Many Mouths: Representing Diversity Through Micro-Regional Foodways, European Southern Studies Forum; Amiens, France. September 2023.
• “Monuments, Memory, and Memorials: Food to Die For and the Old City Cemetery of Lynchburg, Virginia.” Panel: Technologies of Region, Society for the Study of Southern Literature; Atlanta, GA. July 2022.
• “Keep Southern and Cut the Fat: Negotiating Collective Identity and Authenticity in Weight Loss Cookbooks.” Midwest MLA; Milwaukee, WI. November 2021.
• Chair/Respondent: International Conference on Southern Studies, "Doing Southern Studies Today.” Hosted Virtually in Berlin, Germany by Humboldt University, January 2021.
• “The Stories of Southern Cooking: History, Ethnicity, and Authenticating Strategies in Recipe Origin Narratives.” Opera to Okra: Conference on Southern Culture (Converse College, Spartanburg, SC). April 16-19, 2014.
• “Booze and Borderlands: Historicizing Race and Class in the Liminal Spaces of Light in August and Sanctuary.” Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference (Oxford, MS). July 21-25, 2014.
• “‘A Little Less History in Our Hearts’: Arguing Authenticity without History in Garden & Gun.” American Studies Association Conference (Los Angeles,CA). November 2014.
• “‘You Cook. He’ll Want to Eat’: Resisting Gendered Southern Hospitality in Sanctuary.” MLA Conference (Vancouver, BC). January 2015.
• “Canon Plus: A Case for Using Cookbooks in Memoir and Autobiography Courses.” MLA Conference, Austin, TX. January 2016.
• "The Gentrification of the Abattoir, Or the Chef Goes to the Slaughterhouse." Okra 2 Opera 3: Conference on Southern Culture. Converse College, Spartanburg, SC. April 8-9, 2016.
• “Mapping the Imagined South: GIS Mapping of Contemporary Southern Cookbooks.” Keystone Digital Humanities Conference, University of Pittsburgh. June 2016. (Collaboration with student research assistants: Lisa Cuyler, Rachel Geffrey, Kaitlyn Shirey, Tessa Weber, Emily Carter, and Carina Stopenski)
• “Copying and Copyright: The Recipe Text as Offal.” Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, UK. July 2016. (Collaboration with Amanda Milian and Heidi Hakimi-Hood of TCU; paper will be published in conference proceedings)
• “Exotic American Cuisine: Writing About Food and American Identity.” MLA Conference, Philadelphia, PA. January 2017.
• “Certifying the Celebrity Chef: Proving Southern Citizenship Through Narrative.” MLA Conference, Philadelphia, PA. January 2017.
• “Southern Cookbooks and the (Non)Suffering South.” Society for the Study of Southern Literature Conference, Austin, TX. February 2018.
• “Ones to Watch in Southern Food Writing.” MLA Conference; Chicago, IL. January 3, 2019.
• “Culinary Capital and the Cookbook Reader.” Symposium: Cookbooks: Past, Present, and Future. Portsmouth University, Portsmouth, UK. March 2, 2019.