About

Elizabeth Engelhardt is Kenan Eminent Professor of Southern Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She also serves as the Senior Associate Dean for Fine Arts and Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences. A scholar of southern and Appalachian food and culture, she has authored or edited eight books, including Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America (2023) and The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell: Contemporary Appalachian Tables (2019). Engelhardt joined the Department of American Studies as the John Shelton Reed Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies in January 2015 and helped launch the pan-university initiative Southern Futures. Her other notable works include The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South, A Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food, and Republic of Barbecue: Stories Beyond the Brisket. Her research focuses on southern and Appalachian food and culture, contributing significantly to the understanding of regional food histories and cultural narratives.

Research topics

• History
• Sociology
• Art
• Geography
• Art history

Selected publications

• Trying to Get Appalachia Less Wrong: A Modest Approach

  UNC Libraries · 2025-09-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  When the editors of Southern Cultures asked me to guest edit a special issue on Appalachia, I said yes immediately. Not only is western North Carolina my family home, but Appalachian Studies is my most long-standing scholarly home. Literature, music, food, art, entrepreneurship, and scholarship from and about Appalachia are energetic, diverse, robust, and prolific right now—and they have long been so. I am thrilled and honored to have helped create this issue you hold in your hands.

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• Introduction

  Ohio University Press eBooks · 2019-11-05 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Appalachia in Regional Context: Place Matters

  2018-01-01 · 13 citations

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• Gathering Wild Greens

  University Press of Kentucky eBooks · 2018-01-25 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Elizabeth Engelhardt examines Depression-era novels and other sources to examine foodways in Appalachian and southern mill towns in relation to the dietary disease of pellagra. Foraging the commons for wild greens, while not actually curing pellagra, was nonetheless curative for other reasons. Gathering wild greens challenged unbalanced diets and the overreliance on processed foods as well as the regimentation of corporatized clock time and the unhealthy conditions of factory life, consumerism, and commodification. Wandering and gathering in wild places may likewise be curative for at least some of the ills that threaten higher education today.

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• Gathering Wild Greens:

  The University Press of Kentucky eBooks · 2017-12-29 · 4 citations

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• Trying to Get Appalachia Less Wrong: A Modest Approach

  Southern cultures · 2017-01-01 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Trying to Get Appalachia Less WrongA Modest Approach Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution The quiet presence of the mountains testifies that telling shortened and simplified stories of Appalachian people, places, and cultures might prove tricky. Few mountain ranges on the planet are older, have borne witness to more history, and have endured through more seasons of change. All photos courtesy of Roger May. When the editors of Southern Cultures asked me to guest edit a special issue on Appalachia, I said yes immediately. Not only is western North Carolina my family home, but Appalachian Studies is my most long-standing scholarly home. Literature, music, food, art, entrepreneurship, and scholarship from and about Appalachia are energetic, diverse, robust, and prolific right now—and they have long been so. I am thrilled and honored to have helped create this issue you hold in your hands. At the same time, when we began this process, my breath caught in my throat a bit. Because here's what I also know: everyone who has thought they could explain Appalachia—its places, people, or cultures—has gotten it wrong. Every ten years or so, Appalachia's people and culture figure in a national or international discussion—more often as pariahs than participants. Punch line and poster child, Appalachia has long been a cultural scapegoat for the environmental or societal [End Page 4] tragedies that people would rather debate or mourn than fix. All too often it is an empty vessel to be filled with whatever straw men (or women), unexamined assumptions, and a priori claims one wants to set up. Regularly, Appalachia is imagined to need a funeral, to be already gone, to cry out for remembrance. Especially when the discussions have aimed for uncomplicated or simple, the think pieces, talking points, and invocations fall frustratingly short. Maybe this is true about most places, people, and cultures. Big hats or hair, cowboy boots, oil fields, and the ability to leave the nation stand in as an "explanation" of Texas, where I lived and taught for ten years. Reporters "capture" the upper Midwest, where my father is from, by finding casserole dinners, ice-fishing with beer, and river flooding. Places thought to be rural have their population subtracted and their diversity erased; urban spaces, however different from each other, are tagged with an identical set of adjectives. Perhaps this is especially true in the United States today. Fast-paced and wide-swinging pendulums of political, social, and environmental change have pushed 2016 into 2017 and as much guessing as there may be, the ground on which the nation sits feels uncertain and unfamiliar. Appalachia stands out, however, in the sheer length of time that people have believed it could be explained simply, pithily, and concisely. Its land is "strange" and its people are "peculiar"—in speeches in the 1870s and the politics of 2016. Self-identified hillbillies, mountain men, moonshiners, and outlaws are sought to speak for everyone—in penny papers from the 1890s and on reality television today. Serious news stories extrapolate to the whole by focusing in on one industry, and assume that sorting out who is friend and who is at war with it will diagram its complex politics and economies—whether that be timber in 1900, textiles in 1930, or mining through the present day. Media coverage largely portrays one class (poor), one race (white), one religion (conservative Christian), and one world-view (narrow)—and assigns difference to so-called strangers or outsiders. Again and again Appalachia is relegated to the past tense: "out of time" and out of step with any contemporary present, much less a progressive future. Simultaneously, commentators perform sleights of hand to embrace mountain landscapes, sounds, tastes, and fashions as if those have no human lives, trails of earth, or forgotten and erased counterparts behind them. Vacation getaways, popular musicians, newest food fads, and design styles are somehow of but not in Appalachia itself. They are wildly popular and loyally followed by fans around the globe, but they are never reconciled with those other, dark portraits of mountain societies. Whether emphasizing its problems or extracting its products (coal and creative...

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• Riding Deep Waters: An Appalachian Meditation

  ˜The œSouthern literary journal · 2016-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Riding Deep WatersAn Appalachian Meditation Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt (bio) Solitude is deep water, and small boats do not ride well in it. Only a superficial observer could fail to understand that the mountain people really love their wilderness—love it for its beauty, for its freedom. —Emma Bell Miles, The Spirit of the Mountains In 1905, Emma Bell Miles wrote a parable in her Appalachian manifesto, The Spirit of the Mountains (17). Concerned with unfettered development, new demeaning forms of service industry work, and erosion of community that she witnessed in Chattanooga and Walden’s Ridge, Tennessee, Miles picked up her pen to capture southern mountain cultures before tourism, industry, and rapid spread of national popular culture brought what she saw as devastating changes. Miles employed every strategy she had to hand—close textual description, poetry, paintings, folkloric song recording and transcribing, linguistic gathering of phrases and dialect, interviews, and, finally, the political radical’s protest voice, all in the spare 201 pages of the book. Today we might call it a hybrid, multigenre, experimental text. If she were writing it today, surely it would have a digital component, hyperlinks, and interactive crowd-sourced passages. The voice of The Spirit of the Mountains is as complicated as the structure of the book. Sometimes Miles writes in first-person singular: “Early next morning I shut the cabin door and took my way down the mountain,” on her way to learn how to [End Page 16] weave a coverlet from an older woman in the community (38). In other passages, the first person is collective: “We who live so far apart that we rarely see more of one another than the blue smoke of each other’s chimneys are never at ease without the feel of the forest on every side—room to breathe, to expand, to develop, as well as to hunt and to wander at will” (73). At still other times, Miles positions the narrator as an outsider looking in on mountain residents; after all, they “love their wilderness” (17), a perhaps surprising embrace of early-century wilderness aesthetics not placed in Northeast or West.1 She continues, “All alike cling to the ungracious acres they have so patiently and hardly won, because of the wild world that lies outside their puny fences, because of the dream-vistas, blue and violet, that lead their eyes far among the hills” (19)—and I am left wondering what the narrator thinks in this exuberance of their and they. At the same time, the narrator separates self from tourists, whom she calls summer people or city people: “‘Have we not built roads for a people too lazy to build for themselves?’ say the city people. . . . In short, haven’t we paid them well?” (195, emphasis in original). Calling out misunderstandings about lawlessness among mountain residents, suddenly a second-person “you” sneaks in as the narrator directs the reader: “If you read that no attempt has been made to bring the murderer to justice, you may be reasonably certain that the dead man was not valuable to his neighborhood” (75). In other words, “your” interpretation, “fostered by newspaper stories” (74), needs correcting. In the final manifesto chapter, which begins with a clarion “My people, everywhere” (190), the voices combine, sometimes in the space of a single paragraph: “the mountaineers must awaken to consciousness of themselves as a people. For although throughout the highlands of Kentucky, Tennessee and the Carolinas our nature is one, our hopes, our loves, our daily life the same, we are yet a people asleep” (200). Just when I think I have a handle on the text, Miles shifts yet again. The voice is so personal and so detailed that for years scholars tried to read the book as autobiography. But that proved inaccurate. The superficial observation from the small boat is wrong. Miles lived at times in urban Chattanooga, the birthplace of African American blues singer Bessie Smith and home to a vibrant arts community. Coverage of her writing appeared in newspapers, including the Chattanooga News, for which she wrote a semi-regular column, and the Chattanooga Times, the latter owned by Adolph Ochs (who led the New...

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• And the Prize Goes to...

  Southern Spaces · 2015-08-19

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Elizabeth Engelhardt describes how she incorporated an innovative exercise, an article contest, into her teaching, and discusses Simone Delerme's Southern Spaces article "'Puerto Ricans Live Free': Race, Language, and Orlando's Contested Soundscape," the contest winner.

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• The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins

  GeoHumanities · 2015-07-03 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  This article examines the symbolic whiteness associated with pumpkins in the contemporary United States. Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte, a widely circulated essay in McSweeney’s on “Decorative Gourd Season,” pumpkins in aspirational lifestyle magazines, and the reality television show Punkin Chunkin provide entry points into whiteness–pumpkin connections. Such analysis illuminates how class, gender, place, and especially race are employed in popular media and marketing of food and flavor; it suggests complicated interplay among food, leisure, labor, nostalgia, and race. Pumpkins in popular culture also reveal contemporary racial and class coding of rural versus urban places. Accumulation of critical, relational, and contextual analyses, including things seemingly as innocuous as pumpkins, points the way to a food studies of humanities and geography. When considered vis-à-vis violence and activism that incorporated pumpkins, these analyses point toward the perils of equating pumpkins and whiteness.

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• Appalachian Chicken and Waffles: Countering Southern Food Fetishism

  Southern cultures · 2015-03-01 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Appalachian Chicken and WafflesCountering Southern Food Fetishism Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution If we do it right, Appalachian food studies can correct the excesses of southern food fetishism; open up fertile ground for a complicated story of race, class, gender, region and food; and tell a heck of a good story at the same time. Photograph Album 10, Scan 69, ca. 1905–1915, in the John C. Campbell and Olive D. Campbell Papers #3800, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. [End Page 73] In the mountains of western North Carolina in the 1970s and early 1980s, summer Saturday nights brought out square dancers and cloggers. Absent of specialized shoes or frilly petticoated outfits, the dancers only needed an empty barn, a blue-grass band, a caller, and an even number of couples to take the floor. A young Belgian man from Wisconsin discovered the region’s barn dances that night. He had grown up on polkas and had come to the mountains as an engineer for a new industrial plant. The band learned “Roll Out the Barrel” for him and the man learned every complicated figure the caller sang out. He met a woman there whose family had lived in the mountains since the 1780s. They married, had a daughter, and together they attended the dances each summer. Returning home at one in the morning, they arrived at their 1960s suburban house located one mile up a steep mountain. Everyone put on pajamas while he pulled out his chrome-plated electric waffle maker, and before bed he made a breakfast feast for all. Too late for dinner, too early for breakfast, exhausted and energized from music, dancing, and late night adventures, the family added scrambled eggs, syrup, bacon and leftovers to the waffle supper. Were they Appalachian waffles? Does such a thing exist in the popular consciousness? Were they Belgian waffles? They were not what is marketed under the name today—not thick, not covered with whipped cream, not made on a machine stamped with the word. Buttermilk, some cornmeal, and fresh butter turned out crispy, light, and perfectly thin waffles that restored body and soul after a long night of Appalachian dancing and music. The satisfied family tumbled into bed in the wee hours of the night. For Christmas mornings, the same family crawled out of bed well before dawn, in the dark of the cold night. They had to get ready to go to the woman’s mother’s house for country breakfast. Some years there was a pretense of calling it “Christmas brunch,” but the fancy phrase obscured the fact that if you were not there in line with your plate by 7:45 a.m., you missed out. For the family that lived more than thirty minutes away from their destination, quickly exploring a few treasures from Santa, packing gifts, and donning Christmas finery under warm winter coats before piling into the car for the long drive meant early mornings indeed. Upon reaching the bright lights of the house and navigating the driveway packed with relatives’ vehicles, the sleepy family piled into the kitchen. Heat wafting from the stove collided with cold mountain air streaming from the porch. The stove had cast iron skillets and dutch ovens covering every eye—eggs scrambling, bacon crackling, grits simmering, and chicken frying. Gravy was nearby; biscuits were in the oven; ham was already on the table. Family members brought homemade jellies, jams, honey, and cane syrup. Coconut cakes, fruitcakes, divinity, fudge, and other holiday candies and desserts sat ready. The chickens were store-bought and the stove was electric in the 1970s, but little else had changed in the preparation of the fried chicken. Was it Appalachian fried chicken? It was not thickly coated in crunchy layers, not always divided into perfectly sized pieces, not what [End Page 74] Click for larger view View full resolution Appalachia has only slowly been included in [recent] adventures in authenticity. Craft moonshine is having a moment. Ramps, morels, and other foraged wild foods are shipped out of the region to chefs’ kitchens for “reinterpretation.” Ole Smoky Tennessee...

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Frequent coauthors

• Lisa Jordan Powell

  3 shared

• Frances Smith Foster

  2 shared

• Laura Micham

  2 shared

• John T. Edge

  2 shared

• Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman

  2 shared

• Elizabeth Sims

  1 shared

• A. Ware

  1 shared

• Jim Ford

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• John Shelton Reed Distinguished Professor of Southern Studie…