Devin Creed is a PhD candidate in South Asian history at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. 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. 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.
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
Devin’s Fulbright-Hays project is analyzing how South Asians contributed to, contested, and adapted nascent forms of Western humanitarianism, in the process forming hybrid cultures of care and charity. Concurrently, he is examining the arrival of modern nutrition science as a developmental technology of colonial governance which clashed with indigenous foodways. The phrase “giving for eating” highlights his novel approach to the study of famines; this approach combines an archaeology of annadana and other food-gifting practices with a material analysis of famine foods. This turn to the alimentary allows him to show the ways in which endemic famine became constitutive of modern regimes of charity and foodways in South Asia. Devin is accomplishing this through studying archival materials in Bangla, Urdu, Hindi, and English, and by drawing on neo-materialist methods to recreate famine foods.