David Shields, PhD

Dr. David S. Shields is the Carolina Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina and the Chairman of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. He has published 13 books in three fields: early American literary culture, American performing arts photography, and food studies. In October 2017 The University of Chicago Press published the his historical collection of American chef biographies, The Culinarians; Lives and Careers from the First Age of American Fine Dining. His 2017. In 2015 it published Southern Provisions: the Creation and Revival of a Cuisine (University of Chicago 2015), chronicling the emergence in the 1800s of a distinctive set of foodways along the southeastern coast of the United States. As Chair of the CGR Foundation, Shields provided the research enabling Glenn Roberts and Dr. Brian Ward to recover and put into commercial production classic southern ingredients, such as benne, sea island white flint corn, purple straw wheat, purple ribbon sugar cane, the Carolina African runner peanut, and the Bradford watermelon