CFP: Graphic Gastronomy Bandes Dessinées, Comics, Mangas and Food Cultures through History

Conference
15th Conference of the European Institute for the History and Culture of Food
December 3-5, 2025
Tours, France
Stichtag: 28.02.2025
The 15th Conference of the European Institute for the History and Culture of Food to be held in Tours in December 2025, is intended to provide an opportunity for exchange between two fields of study – food studies and comics studies – across all disciplines. It seeks to encourage a deeper appreciation of the importance of ninth art and its potential to contribute to food studies. It also seeks to initiate a dialogue between food and comics studies concerning the ways in which the later address questions and concerns core to research on food cultures. Since the IEHCA has a tradition of broad disciplinary openness and an interest in all cultural areas and historical periods, papers can cover a wide range of fields and approaches. The notions of comics, manga or bande dessinée are considered in their broadest sense as graphic and sequential modes of expression, which some trace back to palaeolithic art, Egyptian and Greek antiquity, as well as to early printmaking traditions, well before the nineteenth century saw the emergence of the vast field of visual production forming the medium of comics.
Suggested topics
1. Comics as source and research field for food studies
  • Comics as a source for food studies: thematic, comparative, synchronic and diachronic approaches.
  • Food cultures and their histories through the prism of comics: expressing identities, promoting hybridization.
  • A medium that shapes gastronomic cultures and culinary practices?
  • Comics and social relations in and around the kitchen: gender, class relations, intercultural exchanges, intersectionality.
2. How do comics deal with, use and treat food and gastronomic themes? How are they affected by new publishing challenges?
  • Narration of gastronomic themes: intention, messages, effects, conveying tastes and senses.
  • Visual, narrative and intermedial approaches to food cultures.
  • What place for comics in gastronomic and culinary publishing?
3. Reception, distribution and readership
  • Readers, audiences, fans, gendered approaches to ‘food’ comics.
  • Uses and effects of reading practices.
  • Comics as a means of communicating the issues surrounding food culture.
Scientific committee:
  • Maaheen Ahmed (Ghent University, Belgique)
  • Loïc Bienassis (IEHCA, France)
  • Jérôme Bocquet (Université de Tours, France)
  • Pierre-Antoine Dessaux (Université de Tours, France)
  • Laurent Gerbier (Université de Tours, France)
  • Irène Le Roy Ladurie (Université de Lausanne, Suisse)
  • Eric Maigret (Université Sorbonne nouvelle, France)
Organizing committee :
Paper proposals must include a title, name and affiliation, a short abstract (max 500 words in English or French) and a short CV (max 200 words). Presentations are expected to last 20 minutes.
Please submit proposals by 28 February 2025 via e-mail:
iehca2025@univ-tours.fr
There are no registration fees for this conference.