Daniela Gutiérrez Flores

Daniela Gutiérrez Flores specializes in early modern Spanish and colonial Latin American studies, with an emphasis on the relations between texts, food, and the culture of labor. She is interested in tracing the cultural meanings of food through textual and social practices, visual and material culture, focusing on the different forms of embodied and intellectual labor implicated in food culture. Her current book project, A Century of Cooks: The Birth of Modern Cooking and the Making of the Spanish Empire, argues that early modernity marked the emergence of the modern notion of cooking as a socially respectable and culturally valuable occupation, akin to an art and form of knowledge. It demonstrates that, while this view of cooking challenged preceding epistemological frameworks that relegated it to an insignificant activity,  such a dignification was only possible through a politics of exclusion rooted in gender, race, and social class.

In addition to her book manuscript, she is currently developing two new research projects. At the intersection of Food and Animal Studies, the first examines the presence of cats in early modern Spanish cultural imagination. It poses the kitchen as a porous space of interspecies and interclass relations through an understanding of the cat as an animal worker intimately tied to the underclasses. She is also developing a micro cultural history of mondongo, a popular tripe stew with origins dating back to the sixteenth century, situating it within the broader context of Afro-Hispanic foodways. Professor Gutiérrez Flores is also interested in using food and sensorial engagement as pedagogical tools in teaching early modern culture and history.  

Daniela is currently the lead Principal Investigator of the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar Thinking Food at the Intersections: Justice and Critical Food Studies, an interdisciplinary research initiative that unearths the systemic roots of food inequity through humanities-based programs.