Krishnendu Ray
Professor, Food Studies; Director, Food Studies PhD Program
Nutrition and Food Studies
212-998-5530
Krishnendu Ray received his Ph.D. in Sociology from SUNY Binghamton in 2001. He holds a master’s degree in Political Science from Delhi University, India. Prior to joining the NYU faculty in 2005, Krishnendu was a faculty member and an Acting Associate Dean for Curriculum Development at The Culinary Institute of America (CIA).
A food studies scholar, he is the author of The Migrant’s Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households (Temple University, 2004) and The Ethnic Restaurateur (Bloomsbury 2016). He co-edited Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia (University of California Press, 2012), and special issues on "Street Vending and Global Cities" in Food, Culture & Society 24, 1 (Spring 2021), and "Culinary Cultures on the Move" in Verge Studies in Global Asias 9, 2 (Fall 2023).
Selected Publications
- Krishnendu Ray, Jooyeon Rhee, and Tina Chen. Eds. Fall 2023. Culinary Cultures on the Move. Verge Studies in Global Asias 9.2, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- “Hands on Food. Theorizing the Present” Cultural Anthropology, ---. Ed. August 2021.
- Krishnendu Ray, Jackie Rohel, and Noah Allison. Eds. Feb 2021. Special Issue of the journal Food, Culture & Society on Street Vending and Global Cities, Volume 24, no. 1.
- Issue of the journal Gastronomica 21.3. “Gastropolitics: Speaking in Tongues,” ---. 2020.
- The Ethnic Restaurateur (Bloomsbury, 2016)
- “Fed by the Other. City Food and Somatic Difference,” Groniek. Eetcultuure (2015) No. 202, pp. 67-84.
- “The Immigrant Restaurateur and the American City,” Social Research 81, (Summer 2014), pp. 373-396.
- “Taste, Toil and Ethnicity: Immigrant Restaurateur and the American City,” Ethnologie francaise, (2014) XLIV, p. 105-114.
- “Disreputable Cuisine and Circuits of Masculinity,” Himal SouthAsian (April 2013) 26, 2, pp. 26-42.
- Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia (University of California Press, 2012).
- "Dreams of Pakistani Grill and Vada Pao in Manhattan: Reinscribing the Immigrant Body in Metropolitan Discussions of Taste." Food, Culture & Society vol. 13. no. 4 (December 2010).
- "A Taste for Ethnic Difference: American Gustatory Imagination in a Globalizing World." In Globalization, Food and Social Identities in the Asia Pacific Region, ed., James Farrar (Tokyo: Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture, 2010). (link)
- Ray, Krishnendu and Tulasi Srinivas. Eds. 2012. Curried Cultures: Food, Globalization and South Asia. (Studies in Food and Culture List). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
- Ray, Krishnendu. 2004. The Migrant’s Table. Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households Philadelphia: Temple University Press —. 2022.
- “Vernacular Taste and Urban Transformation: Towards an Analytics of Fun,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies DO ---. 2020.
- Engaging Ethnic Restaurants to Improve Community Nutrition Environments: A Qualitative Study with Hispanic Caribbean Restaurants in New York City with M Fuster, K Guerrero, B Elbel, TTK Huang, Ecology of Food and Nutrition, 1-17.