IHA Annual Conference 2025

Feeding the Soul: Transnational Narratives of Food and Belonging

This two-day conference, supported by the Irish Humanities Alliance (IHA) and the UCD Humanities Institute (University College Dublin) seeks to explore the role that food plays in transnational fictional and non-fictional literary works, film, and visual arts. Narratives of food and belonging are vehicles for expressing cross-cultural interactions through the languages of nourishment. The sensory aspects of food consumption, such as taste and smell, contribute to reflect the complexity of cultural hybridity and often become metaphors of positive encounter and/or contamination. Further aspects concern the issue of food waste in the West, the obesity crisis and, vice versa, food scarcity and starvation in those countries of the Global South that are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis, warfare and the destruction of indigenous food production. The conference investigates how food is used in transnational artistic outputs to articulate notions of belonging, exile, transnational parenthood, memory and identity, but also food production, food consumption and their ecological dimension.