Our series of lunchtime research seminars continues with this conversation on the cultural, ethical, social and other meanings of food and eating.

Robert McKay is co-Director of the Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre. His research analyses the way novelists, film-makers and other thinkers have responded to unjust relations between humans and other animal species as aesthetic problems as well as political and ethical ones.

Ruth Cruickshank is Programme Director for Comparative Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway. Her work on the untapped critical potential of representations of food and drink in fiction, film and thought explores questions spanning postcolonial food chains, gastrodiplomacy and the problematics of classifying eating disorders. In her latest book Leftovers: Eating, Drinking and Re-Thinking with Case Studies from Post-war French Fiction (Liverpool University Press, 2020) she creates an original critical framework for exploring how representations of food and drink carry figurative, ideological, aesthetic and historical and psychological leftovers of meanings.

All welcome!