Robert Appelbaum is an award-winning literary critic specialising in early modern writing, food studies

Food studies

The term food studies describes the critical examination of food and its contexts within science, art, history, society, and other fields. It is distinctive from other food-related areas of study such as nutrition, agriculture, gastronomy, and culinary arts in that it tends to look beyond the mere...

, and terrorism studies. He teaches in the Department of English at Uppsala University, in Sweden.

Biography

Born in Brooklyn, New York to a working class family, he spent much of his life moving about. Cleveland, Ohio, Chicago, Illinois, Paris, France, San Francisco, California, Cincinnati, Ohio, San Diego, California, Birmingham, Alabama, Middletown, Connecticut, and Lancaster, England are among the places he has lived. He has worked as a steel mill laborer, a director of a Berlitz

Berlitz

Berlitz can refer to:* The Berlitz Corporation, formerly Berlitz International* Maximilian Berlitz, founder of the Berlitz Language Schools* Charles Berlitz, grandson of Maximilian Berlitz and author of several Bermuda Triangle related books...

 School of Languages, an art dealer, and a limousine driver as well as teacher, writer, and editor. Early in his career he published a small amount of experimental fiction, but he has since established himself as an expert on the literature of the Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

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He received a B.A. from the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

 in Tutorial Studies in 1975, an M.A. in English Literature at San Francisco State University

San Francisco State University

San Francisco State University is a public university located in San Francisco, California. As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers over 100 areas of study from nine academic colleges...

 in 1989, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

, where he worked under the supervision of Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Jay Greenblatt is a literary critic, theorist and scholar.Greenblatt is regarded by many as one of the founders of New Historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as "cultural poetics"; his works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term...

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In 2007 he received the Roland H. Bainton Prize for Aguecheek's Beef, Belch's Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjection: Literature, Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns. In that same year he was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for a study entitled Terrorism Before the Letter: Literatures of Political Violence in Britain and France, 1559–1642. The following year he received an AHRC award to complete a book on the literature and culture of restaurants. That project has led to the 2011 volume, ''Dishing It Out: In Search of the Restaurant Experience (London: Reaktion). In 2011 he left his position as a Senior Lecturer In Renaissance Studies at Lancaster University

Lancaster University

Lancaster University, officially The University of Lancaster, is a leading research-intensive British university in Lancaster, Lancashire, England. The university was established by Royal Charter in 1964 and initially based in St Leonard's Gate until moving to a purpose-built 300 acre campus at...

 to take up a Chair as Professor of English Literature at Uppsala University

Uppsala University

Uppsala University is a research university in Uppsala, Sweden, and is the oldest university in Scandinavia, founded in 1477. It consistently ranks among the best universities in Northern Europe in international rankings and is generally considered one of the most prestigious institutions of...

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Further reading

• Robert Appelbaum, Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England, Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 978-0-521-81082-1
• Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet, editors, Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-8122-3853-2
• Robert Appelbaum, Aguecheek's Beef, Belch's Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections

Literature, Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns, University of Chicago Press, 2006.
ISBN 978-0-226-02126-3