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Cindy Ott is an associate professor of history and museum studies at the University of Delaware, and a professor at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy, where she teaches an annual course about American Indian food and culture. Along with her book Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon (2012), she has published articles on American Indian–white relations, food and culture, landscape and memory, and the practice of visual and material culture. She spent more than a decade of her career at the Smithsonian Institution and the National Park Service.
She is currently working on the book “Biscuits and Buffalo: The Ongoing Reinvention of Crow Indian Community,” which explores the ways that Americans have thrived in the reservation era and created positive working relationships with non-Indians. In tandem, she is developing, with the Native nonprofit Center Pole, the Crow Indian Virtual Archive and Museum, a virtual repository of Crow Indian items and images housed in collections around the world, so this material can contribute to the ongoing cultural life of the Crow People.
RCC Project: Crow Indian Buffalo Pasture: American Indian and Non-Indian Collaborations to Preserve Native Nature and Heritage
Selected Publications:
- “Food” and “Image.” In A Book of Common Places: Keywords for a More-than-Human World, edited by Karl Jacoby and Susan Johnson. Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
- “A Historian Walks Into a Bar, or A Story About Alternative Ways of Finding and Using Archives When the Normal Avenues Don’t Cut It.” In Elusive Archives: Material Culture Studies in Formation, edited by Martin Breuckner and Sandy Isenstadt. University of Delaware Press, 2021.
- “Seeing History in 2D: A Tool Kit for Interpreting Images.” Technology and Culture 62, no. 4 (2021): 1199–1216. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0158.
- “Making Sense of Urban Gardens.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies 15, no. 3 (2015): 18–27. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2015.15.3.18.
- “Getting on a High Horse About Food.” Reviews in American History 43, no. 1 (2015): 126–33. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/rah.2015.0009.
- “Crossing Cultural Fences: The Intersecting Material World of American Indians and Euro-Americans.” Western Historical Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2008): 491–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/25443781.