Benjamin Wurgaft

  

I'm an intellectual historian of modern Europe (I received my Ph.D from Berkeley in 2009) specializing in the history of philosophy and social thought in the 20th century, and currently completing a book manuscript on the origins of the idea of the "public intellectual." I'm the first and current Andrew W. Mellon Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Fellow at the New School for Social Research in New York, but based in the Bay Area in Fall 2011. I also write on food culture for Gastronomica and other publications, and am co-authoring a short volume on world food history for Oxford University Press - my interests in this area include the politics of organic and genetically modified foods and the future of the food system.