Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Athia N. Choudhury is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of American Studies, the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. Her current project, “Gut Cultures: Metabolic Personhood and the Promise of Wellness,” turns to the obscured relationship between modern conceptions of health in the U.S. and legacies of empire and militarism in eating cultures across North America, Asia, and the Pacific. Engaging U.S. imperialism as a sensorial project through the poetics of food and eating, the manuscript interrogates how wellness and diet culture become major ideological exports of U.S. empire that produce global consumers whose nutritional and medical decisions become racially coded and gendered during the American century. Choudhury holds a Ph.D. in American studies and ethnicity from the University of Southern California where she was a recipient of the Wallis Annenberg Graduate Fellowship and was previously Postdoctoral Associate in Asian American and Diaspora Studies at Duke University (2022–2024). Her research and scholarship can be found in the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, The Routledge International Handbook on Fat Studies (2021), “Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness,” and the German anthology Fat Studies: Ein Glossar (Transcript Verlag, 2022).