Devin Creed is a PhD candidate in South Asian history at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He has completed field exams in modern South Asian history, global British empire, food history, and science and empire. Devin’s dissertation examines the changes in the practices and ideologies of “giving for eating” in the context of famines in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asia. He works with sources in Bangla, Hindi, Urdu, and English. At Duke, Devin has been a Kenan Graduate Fellow, a Capper Fellow in intellectual history, and a fellow at the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge. He has made public presentations on: the erotica of the pickle in South Asian literature and history; traces of Portuguese cuisine in modern West Bengal; the political theory of B.R. Ambedkar; and the history of Catholic missions in Meghalaya. His research interests include metabolic and ecological histories, food and fermentation, and capitalism and imperialism.
He has previously received grants to conduct research in Philadelphia (on the Knights of Labor), London (on British famine policy), Northern Ireland (on martyrdom in the Irish Republican Army), and India (on famine relief). He received his MA in modern European history from Villanova University (Pennsylvania) and his BA in economics and English literature from Hillsdale College (Michigan).
Devin is an avid cook and food experimenter who spends a good deal of his time pickling, fermenting, baking, and cooking. He enjoys reading science fiction, watching films, backpacking, hiking, singing, and learning languages.
Devastating famines punctuated British colonial rule in India, a period that saw famines in Bengal in 1770 and 1943 which killed over 10 million people. Devin’s Fulbright-Nehru project is arguing that the Indian responses to states of endemic malnutrition and famine played a significant role in creating the postcolonial regimes of food charity – what he calls “giving for eating” – in India today. Devin’s research is being driven by the following question: how did inherited understandings and practices of gifting food change in the face of widespread famine, new ideas of Western humanitarianism, and the birth of modern nutrition science?