Daniela Gutiérrez Flores

Daniela Gutiérrez Flores specializes in early modern Spanish and colonial Latin American studies, with a focus on the relations between texts, food, and culinary practices. She is interested in tracing the cultural meanings of food through textual and social practices, visual and material culture, and embodied and intellectual labor. Her current project examines how cooking allowed men and women across the early modern Spanish Atlantic to engage with lettered culture, shape new identities, and challenge class, gender, and racial structures, posing kitchen work as a constitutive practice of their subjectivity. Ultimately, her work seeks to understand food through the lens of human agents, highlighting the contributions of ordinary laborers to early modern intellectual and cultural life, and tracing the historical disputes that have given way to contemporary discourses of food consumption, production, and circulation. In addition to her book manuscript, she is currently developing a new research project about the associations of Blackness with chocolate in early modern Spanish literature.

Professor Gutiérrez Flores is also interested in using food and sensorial engagement as pedagogical tools in the teaching of early modern culture and history.