CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now with Neisha-Anne Green (Language, Literacy, and Culture)

The Dresher Center's CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now lunchtime series showcases exciting new work in the humanities in a dynamic and inter-disciplinary setting.

Advanced registration for lunch is first come, first basis.

Breaking Bread, Breaking Cycles: Food, Trauma, and Generational Healing in Black Women’s Writing

Neisha-Anne Green, PhD Candidate, Language, Literacy, and Culture
Spring 2026 Graduate Student Fellow
This project grows out of Neisha-Anne Green’s personal investments in food, family, and faith as sites of memory and survival. As a Black Caribbean woman scholar, she turns to literature as both mirror and map for understanding how food practices carry soul legacies across generations. Reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye; Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory; Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus; and Ntozake Shange’s Sassafras, Cypress & Indigo, Green traces how food rituals cooking, eating, refusing, and creating recipes become pivotal in mother-daughter dyads. Food is never neutral: it can transmit silence, shame, and violence, but it can also nourish resilience, creativity, and healing.

Join via WebEx: https://umbc.webex.com/umbc/j.php?MTID=m002a15fb2464b0ca7995c930b6ab3864