FACULTY
Lily Kelting is an assistant professor of Literary and Cultural Studies within FLAME University’s Department of Humanities and Languages. Her current book examines global heritage food movements in a warming, unequal world. She writes at the intersection of ethnography, cultural theory, and food politics, always asking: whose traditions are celebrated, commodified, or erased-and to what end? Whether the object of study is chocolate, coffee, or cows eating trash, she is most broadly interested in food’s relationship to knowledge and power.
After receiving a joint Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego and Irvine in performance studies, and picking up professional theater credits at Moxie Theater and The Old Globe in San Diego, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin. She quit academia to become a cultural journalist and performance critic (NPR Berlin, Exberliner Magazine, Theatertreffen, Tanz im August) but found her way back to the classroom. She teaches courses in theory, performance studies, and gender studies, where she encourages students to connect theory to performance, literature, and their own lives. Her research on contemporary European performance has been published in TDR, Performance Research, European Stages, and Theater Journal. Lily also writes for broader publics, with essays in Emergence Magazine, Vittles, Gastro Obscura, the Kitchn, and elsewhere. Across all her work, Lily centers justice, care, and creative world-making.
Books
- Kelting, Lily. Against Heritage: The Reinvention of Traditional Food. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (Spring 2026*)
*expected, under contract
Edited Special Issues
- Kelting, Lily, Yoriko Otomo and Sinjini Mukherjee, eds. Urban Animals in the Age of Extinction. Global Journal of Animal Law. (Spring 2025*)
- Kelting, Lily, Sarah Dornhof and Nina Graeff, eds. F(r)ictions of Art. Paragrana 25.2: de Gruyter (Fall 2016).
Peer-Reviewed Articles
- Kelting, Lily. “Sorry Not Sorry: Monster Truck’s Postcolonial Anti-Authenticity Spectacular!” TDR 67, no. 2 (2023): 65–84.
- Kelting, Lily. “The Dancer from the Dance: Ontologies of the Body in Eszter Salamon’s and Christophe Wavelet’s Monuments 0.1 and 0.2.” Performance Research 24, no. 3 (2019): 49–54.
- Kelting, Lily. “Designing Caliban: Bringing Race into the Shakespeare Classroom Through Performance-Led Assignments.” This Rough Magic, December (2019).
- Kelting, Lily. “Kimchi and Other Others: Kate-Hers RHEE’s Food Performance in Contemporary Berlin.” Performance Research 22, no. 7 (2017): 126–33.
- Kelting, Lily. “The Entanglement of Nostalgia and Utopia in Contemporary Southern Food Cookbooks.” Food, Culture & Society 19, no. 2 (2016): 361–87.
- Kelting, Lily. “Between Nostalgia and History in the US South: Fictions of the Black Waiter on Film.” Paragrana 25, no. 2 (2016): 162–73.
- Kelting, Lily. “Performing Multicultural Futures on Atlanta’s Buford Highway.” The Southern Quarterly 53, no. 2 (2016): 41–5
Book Chapters
- Kelting, Lily. “From Fried Chicken to Kimchi Grits: Nostalgia for Southern Food Beyond the Lost Cause.” In The Uses of the Past in Contemporary Western Popular Culture, edited by Tobias Becker and Dion Georgiou, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.
- Kelting, Lily. “Performing Primitive Origins of Nordic Food.” In Contesting Nordicness: From Scandinavianism to the Nordic Brand, edited by Jani Marjanen, Mary Hilson and Johan Strang, 2:252. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021.
- Kelting, Lily. “Edna Lewis and the Melancholia of Country Cooking.” Edna Lewis: At the Table with an American Original, edited by Sara Franklin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
Reviews
- Kelting, Lily. “Voices at Work: Women, Performance, and Labor in Ancient Greece by Andromache Karanika.” Classical World 108, no. 4 (2015): 584–85.
- Kelting, Lily E. “Suddenly Everywhere Is Black with People by Marcelo Evelin.” Theatre Journal 67, no. 4 (2015): 732–34.
Public Writing (selected)
- Kelting, Lily. “Holy Terroir.” Emergence Magazine, March 15, 2024. https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/holy-terroir/.
- Kelting, Lily. “Glowing Embers: Sensorial Contexts of Smoke.” Bagh-e Hind (online exhibition catalogue), April 23, 2023. https://www.baghehind.com/post/glowing-embers-sensorial-contexts-of-smoke.
- Kelting, Lily. “Lenses to Magnify Our Appetites.” Enthucutlet Magazine. June 8, 2023. https://enthucutlet.com/enthuoriginals/will-travel-for-breakfast/lenses-to-magnify-our-appetites/.
- Kelting, Lily. “The Curious Case of Colonial India's Breakfast Curries.” Atlas Obscura, February 16, 2022. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/curry-in-colonial-india.
- Kelting, Lily. “Which chocolate is considered sustainable?” Delicious. Magazine, January 10, 2024. https://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/which-chocolate-is-considered-sustainable/.
- Kelting, Lily. “The perils and promise of bean-to-bar chocolate.” Vittles, January 24, 2022. https://www.vittlesmagazine.com/p/the-perils-and-promise-of-bean-to.
Staff Writing
- German Cuisine Package (9 feature articles, 1 recipe), The Kitchn, 2017
- Arts and Culture Reporter, NPR Berlin (2016-2017)
- Coco Fusco (performance artist)
- Ida Applebroog and Beth B, Call Her Applebroog film
- Udo Kittelmann (director of state museums, Berlin)
- Editor and dance critic, Tanz im August Blog (2016-2017)
- Theatre criticism fellowship, Theatertreffen Blog (2016-2017)
- Stage editor and theatre critic, Exberliner Magazine (2015-2017)
- Selected interviews and features:
- Katie Mitchell
- Simon McBurney
- Hari Kondabolu