It will not surprise most that cook books and etiquette guides are not the only media which explore questions of consumption and celebration. Food and drink, their preparation and consumption, as well as private and communal acts of celebration, ritual and pleasure play important roles in grappling with any culture or its products. Furthermore, the richness of these areas of study comes only properly into focus when one also considers the roles which food, drink and celebration serve as agents of social and political power, at times oppressive, at others liberating. The multivalence of both consumption and celebration as critical categories allow the exploration of myriad perspectives, including questions of literary and filmic representation, inequality in gender and political relationships, philosophies of hedonism and self-denial among many others. Food and drink, being indispensable for human life, have always been intertwined with the ways that people interact, from a shared meal to the excesses of the carnival. It is the goal of this conference to engender a wide-ranging, inter-disciplinary discussion of the many ways that consumption and celebration function across artistic, cultural and temporal boundaries.

We invite graduate students from all disciplines to submit papers in English or German on consumption and celebration in the German speaking world. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Food in art, film, music, pop-culture and history
• Ceremony and ritual
• Food and sexual difference
• The Dionysian and Carnivalesque
• Magic Potions
• Food and language
• Anorexia, Obesity and beauty-ideals
• Heimat, nostalgia and food
• Food and memory
• Metaphors of food
• Abstinence and Over-indulgence
• Politics of food
• Drug-use, abuse and addiction
• Starvation
• Food and inequality