CfP: Makers and Making
We invite proposals for contributions to our Summer 2025 issue, featuring the launch of a new season of Around the Table!
Dear RP readers,
We are excited to share the CfP for our Summer 2025 issue of The Recipes Project: MAKERS AND MAKING, co-edited by Sarah Peters Kernan, Kelli Kimura, and Melissa Reynolds. We’ll be collecting pitches in the coming weeks, with an anticipated publication date of August 2025. More info on how to contribute below!
In recent years, recipe reconstruction has garnered more attention from scholars and the public alike, including here on The Recipes Project. Culinary recipe reconstruction initiatives like Marissa Nicosia’s Cooking in the Archives or Victoria Flexner’s Edible History, as well as artisanal and craft recipe reconstruction projects like ARTECHNE at Utrecht University or The Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University, have brought the history of recipes—and the techniques, ingredients, knowledges, and tools necessary to reproduce them—to greater attention. For this special issue of The Recipes Project, our co-editor Sarah Peters Kernan will be launching a new season of her Around the Table podcast devoted to conversations and questions with these intrepid “Makers.” What do we learn through the experience of making? What knowledge do we gain by stepping into the shoes of historical actors? How does making and re-making shape the way we understand recipes as vectors of culture, commerce, or community?
In addition to these interviews and conversations, we seek contributions from scholars, community elders, archivists, activists, and craftspeople that will help us explore and expand on the concept of “making” as a historical, communal, iterative, or experiential process.
Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:
Culinary or craft recipes
The making of family traditions
The trad-wife aesthetic of making
AI and “making”
Making connections
Memory making
Home-making and homemaking
New digital tools for “making”
Fusion and “re-making”
For the upcoming Summer issue, the RP team is soliciting proposals for 500–850 word posts related to “MAKERS AND MAKING,” featuring original research, as well as pieces that engage creatively with the act of making, perhaps in photo or video essays. We welcome contributions from anthropologists, historians, literary scholars, archivists, curators, artists, art historians, material culture scholars, and those with professional backgrounds in public history and commemoration. We value work that engages visual storytelling, so even text-driven posts should include one or two copyright-cleared images. To be considered for this issue, please send a brief pitch (2-to 3-sentences) as well as an abbreviated CV to editors Melissa Reynolds (m.reynolds1[at]tcu.edu) and Kelli Kimura (kelliak[at]uci.edu) any time before 20 June 2025.