Scott Alves Barton is assistant professor in the Department of Africana Studies and became a Kellogg faculty fellow in 2024.
He also is an inaugural fellow in Notre Dame’s Initiative for Race and Resilience, where he engages with African Diaspora food and foodways to interrogate issues and questions of race, equity, and the politics of identity.
Barton teaches Food, Environmental & Cultural Studies, Writing, Anthropology with a focus on Race, Ethnicity, and Global Cultures at New York University, The New School, and Pace University in the CUNY college system, and has been a culinary instructor at the Institute for Culinary Education. He came to Notre Dame initially as a 2021-2022 fellow of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies.
Barton’s research, films, and publications focus on the intersection of secular and sacred cuisine as a marker of identity politics, cultural heritage, political resistance, women’s labor and knowledge, and self-determination in Northeastern Brazil. His current research and manuscript project, “Feeding the Gods: Sacred Nagô Culinary Religious Culture in Northeastern Brazil,” is based on a decade of research in Afro-Brazilian communities.
Barton's publications include book chapters, journal articles, podcasts and short films, with a focus on cooking, culinary history, food and faith, Candomblé and Tambor de Mina religious rituals, and rites of passage. Journals where his work has been published include Food, Culture and Society; Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies; and Culture and Religion, among others.
Barton holds a PhD in food studies from New York University.
