Metropolitan State University of Denver

Dr Laresh Jayasanker

Personal Biography Statement

I am a historian of modern America. My teaching and research focus on the cultural, social and economic changes in the United States during the last half of the twentieth century. I am now writing a book, Sameness in Diversity, which explores how recent immigration and globalization have transformed food and culture in the United States since the 1960s. Using restaurant menus, cookbooks, advertisements, and corporate publications, I examine how Americans came to understand the enormous variety of foods available in grocery stores and restaurants over time. At the same time too, food homogenized across regional and national boundaries, as people around the world ate not just hamburgers on a regular basis, but tortillas and chicken tikka masala.

Before coming to Metro State I taught history at Carroll University in Wisconsin and the University of Texas at Austin. I also taught high school social studies for a few years in the San Francisco Bay Area and continue to care deeply about education policy and practice. In addition to my background as a teacher, I have worked as a writer and editor for a San Francisco “dot com” and as a journalist in Washington, DC.

I have taught the various U.S. History survey courses and specialized classes on social and cultural history, food and culture, civil rights, and the 1960s and 1970s.

Selected Publications

“Tortilla Politics: Mexican Food, Globalization, and Sunbelt America,” in Darren Dochuk and Michelle Nickerson ed., Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region in the American South and Southwest, University of Pennsylvania Press (2011)

“Indian Restaurants in San Francisco and America: A Case Study in Translating
Diversity, 1965-2005,” Food & History 5.2 (2007)

Educational Biography

- Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, American History, 2008
- M.A., Stanford University, Education and Social Studies Teaching Credential, 1997
- B.A., Wesleyan University, Government, 1994

Courses Taught

HIS-1220,HIS-3660,HIS-3980,HIS-4010

Office Hours

Monday - [12:00 to 14:00]
Wednesday - [12:00 to 14:00]

Current Semester Schedule