Ken Albala
Ken Albala is Tully Knoles Endowed Professor of History at the University of the Pacific, where he received the Distinguished Faculty Award for 2023. He has published 29 books on food including academic monographs, single subject food histories, cookbooks, encyclopedias, handbooks, anthologies, translations and is now working on an Atlas of Fermentation.
His Beans: A History won the 2008 IACP Jane Grigson Award for food writing and his Three World Cuisines won the 2012 Gourmand Cookbook Award for Best Foreign Cuisine Book in the world.
He did three video/audio series for The Great Courses, Food: A Cultural Culinary History, Cooking Across the Ages and A History of Bourbon on Audible.
He was coeditor of the journal Food, Culture and Society and series editor for several publishers, having edited over a hundred titles in the past two decades.
His latest books are The Great Gelatin Revival, A Century in Stockton and a cookbook titled Opulent Nosh.
PhD, Columbia University, 1993
MA, Yale University, 1987
BA, George Washington University, 1986
I think the classroom should be fun and exciting and since I love telling stories, much of our time is spent doing just that, as well as discussing important events, individuals and long-term historical processes.
We also read original sources and view contemporary images, learning how history is always a matter of interpretation. We learn to think critically about what historians have written about the past and how their ideas are shaped by their own interests and biases. The same body of evidence can be used to defend very diverse positions and rarely are there plain and straight-forward facts to be memorized. By getting our hands dirty with primary documents, we learn how to write history well, how to support an argument, and ultimately how to tell a good story.
I also think that the skills one learns in my classes make students better researchers, thinkers and writers in whatever professions they decide to pursue.
