I’m a late-blooming scholar, a naturalized American, and an anthropologist among historians.

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I started out being fascinated by myth and ritual, found my way from there into American history (via the Civil War and studying the people who reenacted it), and then started trying to figure out where the heritage business fits in the postindustrial knowledge and service economy.

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More recently, I’ve been thinking about ways to connect my interest in commemorative behavior with the ever more urgent questions about how we might create a less energy-intensive, growth-oriented society. That has led me to explore the convergence of historic sites and contemporary food systems as well as into the hands-on business of food retail, not a place I ever thought I’d be.

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I live in north-central Massachusetts, a part of New England most people don’t know about (which is just fine with us, thank you) with my husband, Fred, who plays the trumpet, and a fluctuating number of cats, who don’t. I teach Anthropology at Tufts University, at the other end of the state. Someday I may find my way back to my ethnohistorical study of Route 2, which connects the two places.

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