About the Project
Recipes Resurrected is a project developed by Master's student researchers in the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in collaboration with SILS' Teaching Assistant Professor, Elliott Kuecker. The project analyzes archival materials from the Southern Historical and North Carolina Collections at University of North Carolina's Wilson Special Collections Library, with support for source discovery from the North Carolina Collection Research and Instruction Librarian, Sarah Carrier.
This project was created through student-driven interests in archival materials of everyday life, particularly recipe cards and cookbooks. Cookbooks and related materials from the Southeast United States are rich sources for scholars working in the humanities and social sciences who study daily rituals, representations of culture, and more. If "food is a text upon which the history and values of the southern people are written" (Davis and Powell, 2014, p. 12), then the archived evidence of the life of food --and food's role in lived experience-- deserve illumination through close study and synthesis. In this project, each researcher spends a semester closely studying aspect of food within their selected area of North Carolina regional cuisine through the cookbooks, recipe cards, and other food sources in the archives. They then use secondary sources to help unfold the significance of these ingredients, curating a new page to this collaborative and growing exhibit.
Researchers
Belle Kozubowski is a founder of this project and project designer. She researched and authored XX. At UNC-Chapel Hill she completed her master’s degree in library science with a concentration in archives and records management. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in mass communication and psychology from UNC-Asheville. Belle has served as a Graduate Digitization Assistant for NC State University’s Special Collections Research Center. In this role she focused on digitizing a wide variety of materials and attaching pertinent metadata to increase accessibility. In addition to her education, Belle is an avid home cook and baker, and growing up in Raleigh has cemented her love for Southern foodways.
Simone Gillespie is project founder and project designer. She researched and authored the North Carolina Food Advertising Through the Years page. Growing up in Johnston County, North Carolina, a county with deep agricultural roots, guides Gillespie's natural interest in Southern foodways. At UNC-Chapel Hill she completed a master’s degree in library science in the Spring 2024. Her research and archival interests center on LGBTQ+ history, sports history, Americana, community archives, and educating the public about archival and special collections access. She holds a bachelor’s degree in both history and English from UNC-Chapel Hill. She has interned with the North Carolina Museum of History, State Archives of North Carolina, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in the Giamatti Research Center.
Adriana Quijano is a founder of this project and a project designer. She researched and wrote the Coastal North Carolina: Recipes from the Archives and Fishing: An Introduction to Coastal Carolina pages. She completed her MSLS at the UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science in spring 2024. With a prior degree from UNC-Chapel Hill in Anthropology and Public Policy, and a minor in Art History, she brings a multidisciplinary perspective to her studies. She interned at the North Carolina State Archives, where she enhanced finding aids and assisted in appraisal report preparation. Adriana has a particular interest in Archives and Records Management and aspires to pursue a career in museum work.
Faculty Coordination
Elliott Kuecker is a Teaching Assistant Professor in SILS at the UNC-CH where he teaches in the archives and record management track and coordinates the Masters of Professional Science in Digital Curation and Management. Before coming to SILS, he worked as a librarian and archivist at several universities. He researches in the fields of archival studies, childhood studies, qualitative inquiry, and related areas. He helped design and organize this project, and runs it yearly as a faculty sponsor.
Research Assistance
Since 2015, Sarah Carrer has worked as a Research and Instruction Librarian at Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill. There she supports research related to the history, people, and culture of North Carolina, engaging with a wide variety of communities on campus and beyond to meet their needs. She especially enjoys providing instruction to undergraduates and K-12 groups. Her passion is local histories and genealogy research using archives. Sarah has a master's degree in information science received in 2008 at the School of Information and Library Science, UNC-Chapel Hill, and she has spent her career in academic libraries at Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill. For this project, she assisted students in finding foodways archival materials from the North Carolina Collection at Wilson Special Collections Library.
References
Davis, D. A., & Powell, T. (Eds.). (2014). Writing in the kitchen: Essays on Southern literature and foodways. University Press of Mississippi.