Allyson Pérez

Allyson Pérez is a first-year PhD student in the Department of American Culture. She holds an A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard College and an M.A. in Gastronomy: World Food Cultures and Mobility from University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. She plans to focus her doctoral research on Caribbean immigrant communities and how they create, perpetuate, and negate nationalist mythologies through food and restaurants. Using ethnographic methods, she would like to explore how food businesses in Cuban immigrant communities become sites where people build communal identities and politics around food, nationhood, and race.