Chestnut Square
Historic Village will begin the month-long celebration of National
Historic Preservation Month with the debut of their “Texas Women of Letters” lecture
series in the Chapel at Chestnut Square on Sunday, May
7. First in the series of talks by outstanding Texas Women
authors will be a McKinney treasure, Sharon Hudgins.
Sharon Hudgins is
an award-winning author and food/travel writer who has also worked as
a university professor, book editor, magazine editor, freelance journalist,
food columnist, media consultant, filmmaker, and photographer.
She lived abroad for 20 years—in Germany, Spain, Greece, France,
England, Scotland, Japan, Korea, and Russia—and has traveled in
more than 40 countries around the world. Her previous residences
have ranged from Munich, Athens, Paris, London, Madrid, and Tokyo, to a shepherd's
cottage in the Scottish Highlands, a German winery on the Mosel River, a mountain village in southern Spain,
and a high-rise apartment building in Siberia.
Her first book, Spain: The Cuisine, the Land, the People, was
published in 1991 in Germany,
where it received a national literary award from the German Academy of Gastronomy. Her second
book, Never an Ivory
Tower, a history of the University of Maryland's global education programs, was published
by the University
of Maryland in
2000. She is the author of a new travel-and-culinary memoir, The Other Side of Russia: A Slice of Life in Siberia
and the Russian Far East (Texas A & M University Press,
2003, 2004), winner of a ForeWord
Magazine Book of the Year Bronze Award and a Cordon d'Or
International Award. Her writings about food have also been included
in several books published in the United
States and Britain. She is a contributor
to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America
and The Oxford International Encyclopedia
of Cheese, and her culinary research has been cited in The
Oxford Companion to Food.
She has presented six papers at the Oxford Symposium on Food, at Oxford University in England. In 1996 her paper on
the foodways of Siberian Buriats was awarded a Sophie Coe Subsidiary
Prize in Food History at Oxford. She has also presented papers on
culinary topics at major conferences in the United States
and has appeared frequently on National Public Radio and cable television
as a culinary expert. She is a member of the International Association
of Culinary Professionals (IACP) and former editor of Prandial
Post, the IACP Food History Newsletter.
More than 600 of her food and travel articles have been published in
magazines, newspapers, scholarly journals, and on the Web, in Europe,
Asia, and the United States, including Gastronomica,
German Life, Russian Life, Sibirica, Hartford Courant, Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Oregonian, Sacramento Bee, San Diego Tribune, The World & I, Chile Pepper, Fiery Foods, Prognosis in the Czech Republic, and two
periodicals in Russia. For seven years she was the food columnist
for The Stars and Stripes
newspaper in Europe, and for several years a regular contributor to
three English-language magazines in Germany. A former editor of Chile
Pepper magazine, she now writes for major publications in
the United States
and Europe, including German
Life magazine where she has been the food columnist since
1997.
She has a bachelor's degree in Government
(with a specialization in Soviet and East European Studies) from the
University of Texas at Austin; a master's
degree in Political Science (with a specialization in U. S.-Soviet strategic
relations) from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor;
and a master's degree in Communications (Radio-Television-Film) from
the University of Texas at Austin. For eighteen years she taught for
the University of Maryland's overseas programs in Germany, Spain, Greece, Japan, Korea, and Russia (where she was the University of Maryland's program coordinator at two Russian
universities). She has also taught at the University of Michigan,
University of Texas, European University, Institute for International
Business Studies in Europe, University of Munich (Germany), and University
of Augsburg (Germany). She has offered courses in International
Politics; History of American, Soviet, and German Films; Film Appreciation;
Film Production; Mass Communications; Journalism; Advertising and Consumer
Behavior; Business Communications; and Contemporary Life in Siberia.
For more information on the “Texas Women of Letters” lecture
series, please contact Chestnut Square at 972-562-8790 or visit online
at www.chestnutsquare.org.
