Student Biographies

Natasha Bunzl is a doctoral student in Food Studies. She researches food and agriculture non-profits and the increasingly emphasized role of celebrity chefs in solutions to food systems challenges. Prior to joining the NYU Food Studies department, she worked for God’s Love We Deliver in communications. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Cornell University and a MA in Anthropology of Food from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Her MA research explored the political stories and myths that restaurants reproduce.

Eric Himmelfarb researches food system poetics: how poetic practices generate movement towards, and meaning around, food justice and food sovereignty. Since 2015, he has been an adjunct professor in the Food Studies program, teaching a course he designed, entitled Food in the Arts: the Poetic Voice. The course utilizes a writing workshop model to engage with political and social issues in food through poetic methodologies and frameworks. Prior to entering the doctoral program, Eric worked for over six years at City Harvest, a non-profit anti-hunger organization in New York City, first in fundraising and then in operations as a manager of food sourcing and procurement. He has a BA in English from Georgetown University and an MA in Food Studies from NYU.

Sofía Jimènez Saborit is a human rights lawyer. She holds a MA in Development Studies from The Graduate Institute of Geneva, where she wrote her thesis on agricultural development in rural regions of Mexico within the framework of food sovereignty. With years of cumulative experience as a lawyer and a development professional, Sofia has been part of several projects on an international level. In 2019 she was part of a consultancy project for PwC, mandated by the Swiss government for the Gender Pay Act to achieve equal pay for women and men. Prior to that, she has also worked in Kenya with non-profit organizations to support Maasai victims of female genital mutilation and early marriages by organizing advocacy campaigns for awareness on gender issues. Sofía’s academic and professional experiences span over 10 years and have helped her acquire a range of inter-disciplinary skills to develop and execute projects to empower people who are systematically disadvantaged.

Sofía’s current research interests include food security, agricultural policy and gender. Her approach to food security aims to identify and understand where food and gender justice intersect. The purpose of her research is to address the gendered power relations and gendered inequalities in food systems and agricultural practices.

Ran Mei is a first-year doctoral student in Food Studies interested in the spatial politics of food. Reading the built environment as the physical manifestation and shaper of social relationships that are deeply entangled with the politics of race, ethnicity, gender, and class, her research explores the social and cultural construction of architecture and infrastructural landscapes of food distribution, consumption, and waste management. Using geospatial analysis, archival research, and ethnography, her master’s thesis Stir-Fry Urbanism traces the changing foods, architecture, and geographic networks of Chinese restaurants in Boston for the past 140 years to reveal the dispensable roles that the Chinese diasporas have played in shaping Boston’s urban landscape and place identity. Before joining NYU in 2023, she worked as an architectural and urban designer in Boston, Tokyo, and Wuhan on projects including Time Out Market (Boston), Moynihan Train Station Food Hall (NYC), and Volpe Redevelopment at MIT Kendall Square (Cambridge). She graduated with a BArch from Syracuse University, and a MA in Design Studies (Critical Conservation) with distinction from Harvard Graduate School of Design.