Dr. Lauren Janes is an associate professor of history and a Towsley Research Scholar. She joined the Hope faculty in 2013. In 2018 she was awarded the Janet L. Andersen Excellence in Teaching Award.

Her primary research interests are at the intersections of twentieth-century French imperialism, global food history and world history pedagogy. 

Dr. Janes teaches World History since 1500, First Year Seminar, Senior Seminar, and upper-level history courses that focus on modern imperialism and decolonization in Africa and globally. She also frequently teaches our history capstone research seminar, HIST 495, and especially enjoys mentoring students through the research and writing process. 

Each May, Dr. Janes co-teaches the Paris May Term, “Art, History, and Global Citizenship in Paris,” with Dr. Heidi Kruas of the art and art history department.

Her first book, Colonial Food in Interwar Paris: The Taste of Empire (2016, Bloomsbury), examines the promotion and consumption of colonial foods in France during and after WWI, revealing the embodied limits of French acceptance of colonial influence on the metropole. Dr. Martin Thomas describes Colonial Food in Interwar Paris: “As this remarkable book shows, the colonial foods that the French chose — and, as significant — chose not to eat open a window onto popular attitudes to empire at a singularly visceral level.”

She is currently writing Nourishing the World: A Global History in Three Foods and One Dish for Hackett's Critical Themes in World History book series.

AREAS OF INTEREST

Dr. Janes' interests include global history and world history pedagogy, food history, France, French imperialism, and the history of race and national identity in modern and contemporary France. 

EDUCATION

• Ph. D., University of California, Los Angeles, 2011
• M.A. University of California, Los Angeles, 2006
• B.A. Hope College, 2004

HONORS, GRANTS & AWARDS

• Janet L. Andersen Excellence in Teaching Award (2018)
• Towsley Research Scholar, Hope College (2016–2020)
• Honorable Mention, Lawerence R. Schehr Memorial Award (2012)

Published Work

• “Forum: World War I and the Origins of the Modern Food System,” Global Food History 5, no. 3, 2019
• “#Couscousgate?,” History News Network, October 8, 2017
• Colonial Food in Interwar Paris: The Taste of Empire, Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2016
• “Writing about Cannibals and Consuming Black Africans in Twentieth-century France,” French Cultural Studies, 26.2, 2015
• “Curiosité gastronomique et cuisine exotique,” Vingtième siècle: Revue d’histoire, 123, 2014
• “Selling rice to wheat eaters: the colonial lobby and the promotion of Pain de riz during and after the First World War,” Contemporary French Civilization, 38.2, 2013
• “Exotic Eating in Interwar Paris: Dealing with Disgust,” Food and History, 8.1, 2010
• “Python, sauce de poisson et vin: Produits des colonies et exotisme culinaire aux déjeuners amicaux de la Société d’acclimatation, 1905-1939” in Le choix des aliments: Informations et pratiques alimentaires, Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais and Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010