Milk, Sugar, Honey: Sweetness and the Making of the Modern World

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon is a distinguished professor of English at Northeastern University and the founding codirector of the NULab for Maps, Texts, and Networks. She teaches in the fields of early American and Atlantic world literary studies, literature and social justice, theatre studies, gender studies, and digital humanities.  

In this virtual talk, will explore the history of sweetness in the form of three substances: milk, sugar, and honey. European settler colonials who developed sugar plantations in the eighteenth-century Caribbean pioneered a system of agricultural monocropping that relied on enslaved labor to jump-start modern capitalism. Dillon will trace how the twin forces of racial capitalism and monoculture have decisively shaped our food chain, our bodies, and our lives from the eighteenth-century to today.. Register online.

Dillon has earned degrees from Brown University (AB), and the University of California, Berkeley (MA and PhD). She is the author of New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 (Duke University Press, 2014), which received the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History from the American Society of Theatre Research, and The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford University Press, 2004), which won the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication at Yale University. She has received fellowships and grants from the Advanced Research Collaborative at the CUNY Graduate Center, the American Antiquarian Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Huntington Library, the John Carter Brown Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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