Jessica Harris Oral History

Collection

Identifier: QMP-0050

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

Obden Mondesir interviews Dr. Jessica Harris, a professor in the Queens College SEEK program. Dr. Harris (b. 1948) was born and raised in Queens. She recalls her childhood in the St. Albans neighborhood and evolving demographic of Jamaica, Queens during the 1950s. As a self-proclaimed “Queens College brat,” Dr. Harris recounts her early relationship with the Queens College campus and faculty, as her mother worked in administration in the music department at Queens College for most of her life. Dr. Harris talks about her schooling from elementary school through her graduate degree, including attendance at the United Nations International School, the High School of Performing Arts, Bryn Mawr College for her undergraduate degree in French, and her graduate studies overseas in France. At the age of 21, Dr. Harris joined the SEEK Program as a French professor. After seven years, she was laid off due to budget cuts and returned as an English teacher, where she remained for 43 years. She speaks of the evolution of the student population in the Queens College SEEK program, how its demographic changed over the years and how the curriculum adapted to and in some cases remained the same to serve those changing populations.

Dates

2021-03-16

Creator

Harris, Jessica (Interviewee, Person)

Access

This oral history is open for research. Media files and transcript can be viewed and/or requested through the Queens Memory Project on Aviary: https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/r/4x54f1n53d. For help using the site, contact QC.Archives@qc.cuny.edu.

Conditions Governing Use

Interview shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Users are free to share or adapt the material for non-commercial purposes, as long as they meet the terms of the license. See license details at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.

Biographical / Historical

Doctor Jessica B. Harris is an award-winning expert on the food and foodways of the African Diaspora and the author of twelve critically acclaimed cookbooks. Her book, High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America, was the International Association for Culinary Professionals 2012 prize winner for culinary history and serves as the inspiration for the show on Netflix of the same name. Her memoir My Soul Looks Back was a 2018 Pen Open Book Award finalist.

Dr. Harris holds degrees from Bryn Mawr College, Queens College, New York, The Université de Nancy, France, and New York University. Dr. Harris was the inaugural scholar in residence in the Ray Charles Chair in African-American Material Culture at Dillard University in New Orleans where she established an Institute for the Study of Culinary Cultures. Dr. Harris has been a professor of English in the SEEK Program at Queens College/C.U.N.Y. for almost five decades.

Bio adapted from Jessica Harris's website http://www.africooks.com/wordpress/?page_id=74

Extent

1 Digital Files ; Duration: 00:50:05

Language of Materials

English

Additional Description

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Donated to Queens College and Queens Public Library by Jessica Harris and Obden Mondesir in March, 2021.

Processing Information

Oral history conducted as part of the Queens Memory Project (http://queensmemory.org), a collaborative program of the Queens Public Library and Queens College to collect stories, images, and other evidence of life in the borough of Queens. This interview was specifically collected for the Queens College SEEK History Project.