Jessica B. Harris

Coming Up

The formation reads as academic and mobile: Bryn Mawr College, Queens College, City University of New York, and New York University. Those schools map a route through study that fits Jessica B. Harris’s habit of thinking across place, history, and food. The education is the point here—broad, rigorous, and suited to a practice built on following connections rather than standing still.

Where They Are Now

The foodways of the African diaspora have been the core of Jessica B. Harris’s work for years, and that field asks for both scholarship and a close reading of lived practice. Her focus moves through kitchens, ingredients, migrations, and memory, treating food as a record of how communities carry themselves forward. Membership in the Southern Foodways Alliance places her within a circle that shares that concern with the South and with the larger histories it holds.

Signature

High on the Hog and My Soul Looks Back are Jessica’s signature works, and their titles point to the range of her voice. One takes on historical breadth; the other turns to remembrance. Together they show a writer and thinker whose authority comes through language, memory, and food knowledge kept in the same frame.

In Their Words “I do, with the vocabulary and the ease of one who has a licence ès lettres from a major university in France and a mimic's ear for language.” “The acquisition of a second language in the 1950s and '60s was a rare thing for most Americans and rarer still for Black Americans.” These lines show a working attention to language as skill and inheritance. The phrasing is exact, and the second quote keeps its historical pressure in view: the 1950s and '60s, and the relative rarity of second-language acquisition for Black Americans in that period. Read together, they describe a mind that treats speech the way a cook treats method—carefully, with memory attached.

Honors

Born in 1948, Jessica B. Harris has been recognized through her membership in the Southern Foodways Alliance. The recognition rests on sustained authority in the field rather than display: knowledge gathered over time, then put back into circulation for others to use.