Sarah Fouts is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies, director of the Public Humanities program, and affiliate professor in the Language, Literacy, and Culture doctoral program. Fouts’s research interests include food studies, labor studies, New Orleans, Honduras, political economy, ethnography, disasters, and community engagement.
Fouts’s book, Rebuilding New Orleans: Immigrant Laborers and Street Food Vendors in the Post-Katrina Era (UNC Press 2025), analyzes the stories of Central American and Mexican immigration in post-Katrina New Orleans. Fouts shows how despite being criminalized and pitted against other low wage workers, immigrants use multiracial solidarities and grassroots resistance to shape politics and culture in New Orleans.
Drawing from this research, Fouts co-produced two documentary shorts as part of the American Folklife Center’s Homegrown Foodways Series (2023). The films entitled, El Camino del Pan a Baltimore, and, El Camino del Mole a New Orleans, were featured in the Maryland Film Festival and the New Orleans Film Festival. Fouts’s next book project, tentatively titled Disaster Foods, will use a transnational, historical, and ethnographic approach to examine how people are fed during times of crisis. Fouts is also working on a collaborative project to produce a documentary film series about the relationship between New Orleans and Honduras.
Fouts was a 2022-2024 Whiting Public Engagement Fellow for the New Orleans-based work, “Project Neutral Grounds: At the Intersection of People, Food, and the Hustle.” Fouts was the principal investigator for the 2022-2023 ACLS Sustaining Public Engagement funded project entitled, “Baltimore Field School 2.0: Undoing and Doing Anew in Public Humanities.” Each project focused on developing qualitative research models that build collaborative humanities projects with community partners.
Fouts’s teaching and research includes public humanities projects like the Baltimore-based Sabor de Highlandtown and New Orleans-based projects with the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, the Southern Foodways Alliance, and the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice (NOWCRJ) New Orleans Black Workers Organize labor history timeline. Fouts produced and edited the series “Latinx Foodways in North America” for the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition. Fouts is also an op-ed contributor for the New York Times and contributes articles to NACLA and Gravy magazine.
Education
- PhD, Latin American Studies, Tulane University
- MS, Urban Studies, University of New Orleans
- BA, History and Spanish, Centre College
Selected Publications
- “How to Do Accompaniment.” Public Humanities. Cambridge Core. Article Accepted for Publication (November 2024).
- “Rethinking the Field in Crisis: The Baltimore Field School and Building Ethical Community and University Partnerships.” Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, co-authored with Nicole King and Tahira Mahdi, 28(1) (April 4, 2024): 63-79.
- “The Great Unbuilding: Land, Labor, and Dispossession in New Orleans and Honduras.” Co-authored with Deniz Daser. Southern Cultures, 27(2) (July 5, 2021): 110-125.
- “When ‘Doing With’ Can Be Without: Employing Critical Service Learning Strategies in Creating the ‘New Orleans Black Worker Organizing History’ Digital Timeline.” Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education, 12(1) (April 2020): 29-38.
- “Re-Regulating Loncheras, Food Trucks, and their Clientele: Navigating Bureaucracy and Enforcement in New Orleans.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, Fall 2018: 1-13.
- “Informed Gatekeepers and Transnational Violence: Using Perceptions of Safety of Latino/a Youth in Determining Immigration Cases.” Co-authored with Clare Cannon and Miranda Stramel. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 40(2) (May 2018): 134-149.
- “The Mafia, La Raza, and the Spanish-Language Press Coverage of the 1891 Lynchings in New Orleans.” Journal of Southern History, 83(3) (August 2017): 509-530.
- “Presumed Palettes and the Problems Perceived: Exploring Latin American Food and Food Establishments in the United States and New Orleans.” Race, Gender, and Class, 18(3-4) (2011): 316-328.
Courses Taught
AMST100 Introduction to American Studies
AMST200 What is an American
PUBH200 Introduction to Public Humanities
AMST300 Approaches to American Studies
AMST372 American Food
AMST357 Transnational Americas
AMST403/687 Food Ethnography
AMST490 Seminar
she/they