Susanne Freidberg

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Susanne Freidberg is a professor of geography at Dartmouth College. Her research spans the fields of agro-food studies, cultural economy, and science and technology studies. Her first book, French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age (Oxford University Press, 2004), is a comparative multisite ethnography of two postcolonial fresh produce trades linking Africa and Europe. Her second book, Fresh: A Perishable History (Belknap Press, 2009), examines how the meaning of freshness in food has changed along with the technologies designed to protect it.

At Radcliffe, Freidberg plans to write about the history of and current controversies surrounding sustainability, especially as applied to food and agriculture. She will draw on an ongoing ethnographic study of the expert communities now debating how to measure and somehow improve food’s overall environmental and social footprint.

Freidberg received a BA in anthropology from Yale University and a PhD in geography from the University of California at Berkeley. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Program and the National Science Foundation. She has also held an American Council of Learned Societies Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship.