Rachel Herrmann

Rachel B. Herrmann is Senior Lecturer in Modern American History at Cardiff University and co-editor at Global Food History. 

At the Koch History Centre, Rachel will spend the year revising her next book, Water, Hunger, and Borders in the Gulf South, which has won funding from the Eccles Institute for the Americas and Oceania, the John Carter Brown Library, the Newberry Library, and the Leverhulme Trust. This project shifts our understandings of scarcity, power, and knowledge by attending to bays, coasts, islands, rivers, and swamps. In dealing with the homelands of Indigenous people who used their control of abundant waterways to manage scarcity better than colonists, the project traces overlapping histories of beef, corn, fish, nut milk, river cane, and venison.

Rachel's research, which draws extensively on eighteenth-century manuscript maps, is interested in sharpening historians’ abilities to say which foodstuffs constituted food knowledge, and to identify the Indigenous and African people who made and remade that knowledge through their management of animals and water and terrestrial plants. In so doing Water, Hunger, and Borders will reframe what we know about scarcity and abundance in what became the United States.

Rachel Hermann's books include No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution; To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic; and (with Jessica Choppin Roney) Claiming Land, Claiming Water: Borders and the People Who Crossed Them in the Early Modern Atlantic.

Her articles have been published in Diplomatic History, Early American Studies, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Slavery & Abolition, and the William and Mary Quarterly.