Christy Shields-Argeles gave a two day intensive seminar on the topic of "Gastronomy and Identity" to international students at the Institut Polytechnique de LaSalle Beauvais.

Christy Shields-Argelès is an anthropologist who specializes in food studies and cross-cultural comparison. She explores a variety of themes within this frame: the processes of change associated with globalization, especially as they apply to our food supply and eating habits; national and regional identity; nutritional and gastronomic discourse; and cultural representations of the body, health, taste and pleasure. These themes are explored in her recent publications and her doctoral thesis, a comparison of the cultural representations of the diet-health link in France and the United States that will be defended in 2009 at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS).

Shields-Argelès began teaching undergraduate anthropology at AUP in 2001. Her courses encourage students to critically examine the worldviews of other cultures and their own taken-for-granted, culturally shaped ideas and beliefs. She also motivates students to explore Paris in the context of her courses, using their local surroundings as a springboard to further their interest in and understanding of both anthropology and France.

Outside of AUP, Shields-Argelès is associated with the CETsah (Centre d'études transdiscpliniare: sociologie, anthropologie, histoire), a CNRS research center attached to the EHESS that unites multidisciplinary researchers around a series of central research themes, including food, body, nature, memory and identity. She also works periodically as a freelance market researcher.

  Book chapters

“Alimentation et Identité Nationale: le soi et l’autre en France et aux Etats-Unis.” In C. Fischler and E. Masson (eds.), Manger : Français, Européens et Américains face à l’alimentation. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008.

“Célébrer la fin du sevrage: A propos du texte de Jean-Pierre Winter” in M. Szejer (ed.), L’art de nourrir les bébés. Paris: Albin Michel, 2008.

  Journal articles

With Paul Rozin, Claude Fischler and Estelle Masson. “Attitudes towards large numbers of choices in the food domain: A cross-cultural study of five countries in Europe and the United States”, in Appetite Vol. 1, No. 5, pgs 304-308, 2006.

"Imagining the Self and the Other: Food and Identity in France and the United States", in Food, Culture and Society , Vol. 7, No. 1, pp: 14-28, 2004. (Winner of the ASFS 2003 McIntosh Graduate Student Paper Award).

With Paul Rozin, Claude Fischler, Kimberly Kabnick and Erin Pete. "The ecology of eating: smaller portion sizes in France than in the United States help explain the French paradox", in Psychological Science, 14, 5, pp: 450-454, September 2003.

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