Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture 11 (2025): 67                       ©American Folklore Society 2025 
 
 

Contributors 
 
 
Ruzhica Samokovlija Baruh is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Folklore at 
Memorial University of Newfoundland. The main objective of her thesis is to explore ajvar, 
a popular Macedonian relish, as a multifunctional and polysemic symbol that operates in 
distinct, albeit interconnected social, cultural, and political spheres. In delineating these 
interactions and meanings, the thesis investigates how this popular food functions as a 
signifier of Macedonian identity. 
 
Samantha Ruth Brown is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at the 
University of Oregon. Her current research concerns the cultural politics of food in 
Denmark and Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), especially in relationship to race and 
colonialism. 
 
Hanna Griff, Ph.D. is part time faculty at the New School in New York City in the Culture 
and Media Department.  She has been teaching Folklore and Oral History at the New School 
for about 18 years and was the former Director of Public Programs at the Museum at 
Eldridge Street.  She teaches memoir writing classes at various places in the city and online 
and is completing her memoir of her time living and teaching in Japan.  
 
Isabel P. B. Fêo Rodrigues received a Ph.D in Anthropology from Brown University and is 
currently a Professor and Chairperson of the department of Anthropology and Sociology at 
the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.  Her research and publications primarily 
engage processes of change and power asymmetries brough about by European colonialism 
and inequitable globalization, including consumption and commodification of nature, food 
insecurity and coping mechanisms, cultural and linguistic creolization, and postcolonial 
resistance to these transformations.  She has conducted ethnographic and applied 
participatory research in the USA, Cabo Verde, Brazil, and Ecuador. 
 
Farha Ternikar is the director of Gender and Women’s Studies at Le Moyne College, 
Syracuse. She has authored “Intersectionality and the Halal Kitchen” in Feminist Food 
Studies (Canadian Women’s Press/Elaine Power, editor) and "Biryani with the Golden Girls" 
in Food, Culture and Society.  Her forthcoming book is an edited volume with Stephanie Y. 
Evans: Transnational Culinaria: Women of Color and Feminist Food Studies  (SUNY press). 
 
Salma Valadez-Marquez is a PhD candidate in Romance language at the University of 
Oregon. She is specializing in Mexican and Mexican-American foodways. Her dissertation 
project, "Mexican Food and Lore Beyond the Fictions we've been Fed," analyzes the how 
food is used to tell stories about migration, displacement and identity. 

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