Josephine Baker Honors Thesis Prize

Our inaugural Josephine Baker prize for an undergraduate Honors thesis goes to Max Smith for Wine to Whiskey: The Transformation of the American South through French Culinary Practices. Smith, a member of Stanford’s Class of 2021, is a double major in International Relations and French. His thesis analyzes the complex development of Franco-American Southern identity through the interpretive lens of foodways, or the eating habits and culinary practices of a people. In his innovative and original study, Smith draws upon a wide array of primary sources including cookbooks, menus, and early twentieth-century news clippings. He uses these to analyze the critical, transformative way in which the American South, facing economic and social disparities, responded to upper class French cuisine. Smith reveals the process by which Southern foodways emerged in relation to French culinary practices through a combination of exclusion, rejection, and adaptation, becoming central to a distinctly Southern culture.