Dr. Beth Forrest is a professor of history within the Food Studies and Liberal Arts department at CIA’s New York campus. She teaches World History 2: Medieval to Age of Revolution, Food History, Introduction to Gastronomy, Japanese Culture and History, and History and Culture: Spain.
Dr. Forrest is the former president and current board secretary of the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS) and is a principal investigator for the Mellon Foundation-funded projects “Food, Community, and the Humanities” and “Food, Race, and the Humanities.” Her leadership within ASFS has helped strengthen connections between food scholarship and the broader humanities.
A scholar of food culture, history, and identity, Dr. Forrest is co-editor of From Garum to Mole: Sauces and Identity in the Western World (Oxford UP, 2026), Food in Memory and Imagination: Place, Space and Taste (Bloomsbury, 2022), and Introduction to Gastronomy (Cognella, 2015). Her forthcoming book is a miscellany on butter.
Her research, which examines the sensory and symbolic meanings of food, has appeared in numerous scholarly journals and edited collections, including Food, Culture & Society, Global Food History, Food & Foodways, and The Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies. She has contributed to The Oxford Companion to Cheese, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Food Issues, The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, and Gastronomica.
Dr. Forrest has also been widely quoted in national media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, Better Homes & Gardens, CNN.com, Forbes.com, The Chicago Tribune, and The Boston Globe, among others.
Before joining CIA’s faculty in 2009, Dr. Forrest served as assistant director of the Programs in Food and Wine at Boston University, where she worked with the celebrated culinary arts program founded by Julia Child and Jacques Pépin. She also taught in the Metropolitan College at Boston University and the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain.
Dr. Forrest earned her PhD, MA, and BA in History from Boston University, where her doctoral research explored the role of food and the senses in shaping Spanish identity in the nineteenth century.