Andrew P. Haley

Andrew P. Haley studies class and culture in the United States from the Gilded Age through the 1950s. He has a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh and a bachelor degree from Tufts University.

His first book, "Turning the Tables: American Restaurant Culture and the Rise of the Middle Class, 1880-1920," was published by University of North Carolina Press in May 2011. "Turning the Tables" argues that changes in restaurant culture at the turn of the century—battles over French-language menus, scientific eating, cosmopolitan cuisine—demonstrate the growing influence of urban middle-class consumers. It was a finalist for the International Association of Culinary Professional's 2012 Book Award for Culinary History and is the winner of the 2012 James Beard Award for Scholarship and Reference.

Andrew's publications also include articles in The Public Historian, Midwestern Folklore and Food & History. He is the recipient of grants from the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, the College of Arts & Letters at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM), the Committee on Services and Resources for Women at USM, the Aubrey Keith Lucas and Ella Ginn Lucas Endowment for Faculty Excellence at USM, the Andrew F. Mellon Foundation, and the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Recently, Andrew has been working with McCain Library and Archives on a project documenting community life in Mississippi through the community cookbooks that were published in the 20th century. (Learn more about the Mississippi Community Cookbook project by visiting its website.) That project is also the source for his next book, an exploration of how local and national ideas about food shaped daily life very, very tentatively titled "Kissen' Don't Last; Cookery Do." He is also working on children and eating, both in public and private. His further interests include the globalization of restaurant dining, Chinese cuisine in the United States,19th-century perceptions of cooking in New Orleans, “virtual restaurants” in the 1950s, and historical perceptions of taste.

Andrew loves to teach. He is the recipient of a 2001 K. Patricia Cross Award from the American Association for Higher Education and a 2012 Mississippi Humanities Council Teaching Award. He teaches American history, specializing in the late-19th century and first half of the 20th century, an age when every aspect of modern American life took shape. He is especially interested in the cultural lives of everyday Americans and has taught courses on popular culture, labor, sex, gender, food, and nationalism. As a member of the graduate faculty he also regularly teaches classes on U.S. historiography, the philosophy and methods of history, and the theory and practice of American cultural history.

To his immense pleasure, Andrew was allowed to judge the best cake competition at the 24th Annual Mississippi Pecan Festival and, more recently, he has served as an expert panelist for The Munchies and a judge at America's oldest cooking competition, the Pillsbury Bake-off.