Carolyn de la Peña is an Associate Professor of American Studies and also directs the Davis Humanities Institute. She came to Davis in 2001 by way of Austin, Texas and Riverside, California. Her research and teaching interests focus on popular technology and science, material and business cultures, gender, and food.
De la Peña’s current project is a cultural history of the production and consumption of artificial sweeteners in the United States. She has written previously on the machines of Krispy Kreme, the spaces of Prada stores, and the popularity of electric belts. She is the author of The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (NYU, 2003) and the co-author of Rewiring the “Nation”: The Place of Technology in American Studies (Johns Hopkins, 2007).
She is currently working on Empty Pleasures: An Unnatural History of Artificial Sweetener, forthcoming from University of North Carolina Press — a cultural history of the production and consumption of saccharrin, aspartame, and sucralose in the U.S.