Nina Mukerjee Furstenau

Nina Mukerjee Furstenau is a journalist, book author and a current 2018-19 U.S. Fulbright-Nehru Global Scholar in Kolkata researching her upcoming book, Green Chili & Other Impostors based on the heritage foods of Bengal. She is the editor for the book series, American Foodstory, at the University of Iowa Press, former director of food systems communication at the University of Missouri’s Science and Agricultural Journalism Program, and adjunct faculty at the Missouri School of Journalism. Her research interests include food history and identity, food systems and hunger, and the flavors of place. During her tenure at MU, she established the curriculum for the Food and Wine Journalism program and received the University’s Teaching Excellence Award. She has served as socio-economic research project manager for the USAID and McKnight Foundation Climate Resilient Beans Innovation Lab and the USAID Soybean Innovation Lab in Mozambique and Ghana from 2013-2018 .Furstenau graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism in 1984 and went into the Peace Corps in Tunisia from 1984-86, where her love of food story and its link to culture and nutrition was born. She was publisher of two heavy equipment magazines and an environmental soil and groundwater publication from 1987-2001, before doing her graduate work at the University of Missouri in English-Creative Writing. She is a frequent speaker about writing, storytelling, and food identity at conferences such as Nonfiction Now, Unbound Books, and Midwest Foodways Alliance. Her project in Kolkata this year hopes to use the lens of food to cut across cultural boundaries, and bring journalism and creative non-fiction to the dynamic research area of food ethnography.

For more information, please see https://www.ninafurstenau.com/