Carole M. Counihan is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania and Visiting Professor of Food Anthropology in the Boston University MLA program in Gastronomy. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she earned a BA in history cum laude from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts. Counihan's research centers on food, culture, gender, and identity in the United States and Italy. She conducted fieldwork in Bosa (Sardinia) and Florence (Tuscany), Italy during the 1970s and 1980s, and published "Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence" in 2004. Long fascinated with women's complex relationship with food and body, she explored gender, food, body, reproduction, and culture in her book "The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power" (Routledge, 1999). She is editor of "Food in the USA: A Reader" (Routledge 2002); with Penny Van Esterik, of "Food and Culture: A Reader" (Routledge 1997, 2008, 2013); and with Psyche Williams-Forson of "Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World" (Routledge 2012). She conducted fieldwork from 1996-2006 in a Hispanic community in Colorado, collecting food-centered life histories from nineteen women. Based on this research and supported by a 2005-2006 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, she authored "A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado" (University of Texas Press, 2009). She is editor of the scholarly journal "Food and Foodways." Counihan is currently conducting an ethnographic research project on food activism in Italy.