Professor Peter Naccarato earns Teaching Excellence Award

Jill Stevenson, chair of last year’s Teaching Excellence Award Committee and assistant professor of theatre arts, made the announcement at the Faculty Development Workshop on September 23. As recipient of this award, Professor Naccarato will give an address at the 2009 Baccalaureate Ceremony.

“I’m especially moved by this award because it comes from my faculty colleagues,” said Naccarato. “We have such a gifted and talented faculty so to be singled out from this group is quite an honor.”

Professor Naccarato specializes in twentieth-century literature, literary theory, and cultural studies. He has written on the Modernist period, with a specific emphasis on Virginia Woolf. His recent research is in the area of food studies.

Professor Naccarato has been actively engaged and supportive of the Bedford Hills College Program (BHCP). He was a coorganizer of Crossing Borders II, a conference held at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility on October 17. Crossing Borders is an event which boasts panels and conversation among Marymount Manhattan students from the 71st Street campus and BHCP as well as faculty and staff from the consortium colleges and universities. Naccarato shared remarks during the program’s opening ceremony and he and Kathleen LeBesco presented work on on-line restaurant review sites that is part of their current book project. Professor Naccarato looks forward to the opportunity to teach at Bedford Hills in the near future. 

Naccarato has done extensive scholarly work and authored several publications on food and its connections to ideology and individual and group identities. Naccarato and LeBesco co-edited Edible Ideologies: Representing Food and Meaning, a collection of scholarly essays, which was published in 2008. The two authored the book’s critical introduction as well as one of its chapters, “Julia Child, Martha Stewart, and the Rise of Culinary Capital,” which analyzes economic class and social status in cooking and entertaining. They also developed and regularly team-teach a cultural studies seminar titled “Edible Ideologies: The Politics of Food” at Marymount Manhattan. Naccarato and LeBesco were featured in several articles in Bloomberg News, The International Herald, The Glens Falls Post Star, and The Kingston Daily Freeman for their presentation on food, family and loyalty at a scholarly conference about “The Sopranos” at Fordham University. Professor Naccarato and Professor LeBesco are currently collaborating on a book project, tentatively titled Culinary Capital, in which they further develop ideas first articulated in their chapter on Julia Child and Martha Stewart in Edible Ideologies. 

Professor Naccarato earned a B.A. from Villanova University and a Ph.D. from the State University of New York, College at Stony Brook.

Published: November 12, 2008