The April 11 event will be a moderated discussion about food, sustainability and economic development featuring chef Vivian Howard of the award-winning PBS show, “A Chef’s Life,” and Cynthia Hill, the show’s director.
Elon University will be offered a taste of “A Chef’s Life” during this year’s James P. Elder Lecture in Whitley Auditorium on Thursday, April 11.
The event, which begins at 6:30 p.m., will be a discussion about food, sustainability and economic development featuring the star of the award-winning PBS show, chef Vivian Howard of Kinston, N.C., and the show’s director, Cynthia Hill. Moderating the discussion will be Marcie Cohen Ferris, a professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
A native of Deep Run, N.C., Howard got her start in the advertising business before shifting to a career based around food. After training as a chef in New York City, Howard and her husband, Ben Knight, returned to North Carolina in 2005 to open “The Chef & Farmer,” a farm-to-fork restaurant in Kinston. Howard developed strong relationships with local farmers, building to the point that more than 70 percent of the foodstuffs used at the restaurant came from within 60 miles.
“A Chef’s Life” premiered on PBS in 2013 as a half-hour character-driven documentary and cooking series centered around the life of Howard and Knight. The show built a nationally following and ended its five-year run in 2018, with Howard and the show collecting Emmys, Peabody Awards and James Beard Awards along the way.
“A Chef’s Life” was the first serial television series for Hill, a Durham-based documentary director and producer. Hill knew Howard from growing up together in eastern North Carolina and began a collaboration that would produce the award-winning show.
Leading the April 11 discussion will be Ferris, whose research and teaching interests include Southern history and culture, particularly the food and material culture of the South. She’s the author of multiple books including “Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South,” which was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award, and “The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region.”
All tickets for the event have been distributed. The discussion will be streamed to Yeager Recital Hall for those without tickets.
The James P. Elder Lecture is an endowed lecture series devoted to the exploration of critical scholarship and its impact on the public forum. When Elder served on the history faculty of Elon (1963-1973), he was advisor to the Liberal Arts Forum, which he founded as an undergraduate. Thirty years after he left Elon for the Folger Library in Washington, D.C., a group of Forum alumni established an endowed lectureship in Elder’s honor. More than 150 former students and friends have contributed to the Elder Lectureship in tribute to Elder’s example of faculty-student engagement.