Jane Levi, PhD

Jane Levi is a researcher, writer, and educator. She holds a BA in English Literature from the University of London, an MA in Gastronomy from the University of Adelaide, and a PhD in Cultural History (bringing together food history and utopian politics) from King’s College, London (KCL), where she also received her Post Graduate Certificate in Higher Education. She is a CELTA-qualified English language teacher.

Jane taught literary theory at KCL and food history and politics at Birkbeck, University of London, a course which led to the book Food Politics & Society: Social Theory and the Modern Food System (University of California Press, 2018), co-authored with her colleagues. Passionate about communicating with audiences outside the academy, she regularly delivers workshops and lectures for museums and cultural institutions as well as writing articles on food history and culture for scholarly and popular publications¬–from Gastronomica to GQ.

A visiting research fellow at KCL Jane contributes to its Georgian Papers project, focusing on dining and cookery in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and was the program’s Mount Vernon Fellow in 2018. She was co-founder of the artist’s co-operative, Edible Utopia, co-producing its creative urban growing initiative at Somerset House, London (2016-21), and researcher and guest curator of Feeding the 400, an exhibition on food for the Foundling Museum, London in 2016-17. Jane is chair and trustee of the Sophie Coe Prize in food history. She was born in Wales, grew up in Scotland, and has been resident in London for 30 years.