About me

Gabriella M. Petrick, Ph.D. received her degree from the University of Delaware as a Hagley Fellow and completed an EU Marie S. Curie Fellowship at the University of Stavanger where she continues as a Research Historian with the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities. Her interdisciplinary research on food combines the fields of the history of technology, sensory history, environmental history and the history of science. Additionally, Dr. Petrick’s training at the Culinary Institute of America, Cornell University and at several wineries in Napa and Sonoma Counties has shaped her theoretical approach to the history of taste. Her first book project, tentatively entitled Industrializing Taste: Food Processing and the Transformation of the American Diet, 1900-1965, analyzes how new food processing techniques transformed the foods available to American consumers as well as how housewives incorporated these new industrial foods into their family’s diet over the course of the last century. She is also finishing a second book project, Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter: Taste in History that looks at the importance of taste historically. Her new project looks at the globalization of wine in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and how scientific inquiry and technological innovations have changed the taste of wine in the glass. She has won many awards for her scholarship including the Hindle Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Society for the History of Technology, the W. Gabriel Carras Award for Junior Scholars from the Steinhardt School, New York University. She has also won both National Science Foundation and USDA grants. She has published in the
Journal of America History, Agricultural History, History and Technology, among other journals and edited volumes and has taught at NYU, George Mason, and Boston University among others universities and institutes. She has appeared on the History Channel, the Food Network, NPR, and comments in publications such as The Atlantic, Cosmopolitan and the Washington Post.