Company description

The Museum of Food and Drink has launched New York City’s first food museum with exhibits you can eat. Our mission is to change how people think about food and inspire day-to-day curiosity about what we eat and why.

MOFAD Lab is our first brick-and-mortar home. It is a 5,000 square foot space located on McCarren Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. MOFAD uses this space to design, build, and showcase its exhibit concepts to the public as our team works toward opening the full museum. MOFAD Lab's first full-scale exhibition, Flavor: Making It and Faking It, opened to the public on October 28, and examines the science and history of the flavor industry. In addition to the exhibition, MOFAD Lab will hosts a regular schedule of educational programming, including lectures, tastings, and workshops. Learn more at lab.mofad.org.

Job description

Overview - MOFAD City Researcher - Chicago, IL

MOFAD City is a first-of-its-kind educational program that, in essence, turns city neighborhoods into living food museums. The heart of this program will be a dynamic website that curates culturally significant food businesses, grouping them into tours that explore topics in cultural anthropology, world history, and urban geography. Each tour will consist of approximately six real-world “exhibits” in the form of neighborhood restaurants, bakeries, markets, vendors, and culturally significant landmarks. For each tour, MOFAD will collaborate with writers and developers at Eater to include textual and audio narration providing cultural and historical context; recommended tastings; and other multimedia content such as interviews, oral histories, archival photographs, video, and other visual components.

Each tour will tell the story of a food culture within the context of a particular neighborhood (for example, contemporary Afro-Caribbean foodways in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, or Vietnamese immigrant food entrepreneurs in San Jose). The museum will work with community leaders, business associations, culinary historians, and food anthropologists to ensure that each tour accurately and thoughtfully represents the educational themes of MOFAD City.

MOFAD City will launch in October 2016 with three virtual “tours” in New York City. MOFAD is currently seeking researchers for additional tours scheduled to roll out in Miami, San Jose, Chicago and Washington, DC in October and November, 2016

Job Description

MOFAD will assign a local researcher to develop content for each tour. Each researcher will work with MOFAD and Eater staff and writers to define a narrative and series of exhibits for her/his tour. Researchers will be responsible for helping to develop the following:

• Overall descriptive tour narrative. This may be historical or contemporary in focus, depending on the nature of the neighborhood and featured food cultures. This narrative may also cite relevant theoretical or conceptual frameworks used to frame to the tour’s scope.
• Descriptive content for six proposed exhibits (food businesses) and six dishes to highlight.
• Photography and video content. Researchers will not be responsible for photography or video, but will be asked to coordinate on video and photo shoots, and may be asked to find archival photographs.
• Audio content, including interviews and oral histories with business owners and neighborhood residents
• Preliminary reading list (10-15 books and/or articles) for her/his tour, and, if possible, suggested resources for further research (library collections or archives).
• Where needed, researchers will identify and collaborate with historical and/or cultural experts (academics, authors, historians) who can provide additional oversight.

MOFAD is currently seeking researchers for the following tours:

• San Jose, CA // Vietnamese cuisine
• Miami, FL // Haitian cuisine
• Chicago, IL // Mexican cuisine
• Washington, DC // Ethiopian cuisine

Requirements

Researcher candidates should fulfill all of the following criteria:

• Possess general knowledge of the foodways and culture featured in their desired tour.
• Live in the target city and have general knowledge of the relevant neighborhood
• Have an understanding of the interplay between food, culture, and migration in an urban context.

Ideally, researchers should also fulfill some of the following criteria:

• Possess broad historical and contemporary knowledge of the neighborhood featured in her/his tour.
• Have demonstrated experience with public history projects. (For example: researching and writing content for exhibitions, conducting and editing oral history interviews, or developing historical film documentaries.)
• Graduate students in food studies, history, anthropology, or urban studies are encouraged to apply

Candidates with language skills relevant to their desired tour will be given priority.

Timing

Research will begin immediately, and content deadlines vary by tour location; all content must be completed by the end of September, 2016. Given the tight deadline, the goal is to confirm all researchers as soon as possible.

Compensation

This is a paid position; researchers will be compensated for local travel and food expenses (within budget limitations), and receive a stipend

Compensation

this position is: stipend / non-monetary compensation

Application instructions

Deadline

August 30, 2016