Phone:(573) 882-7302 (O)
Phone:(573) 442-2553 (H)
Fax:    (573) 882-1473
Email :BarhamE@missouri.edu

Biography

Professor Barham was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and grew up in the south of the United States. She received her B.A. with a double major in English and French from Vanderbilt University in 1977 and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She attended two universities in France, Université de la Sorbonne in Paris and Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, receiving an advanced degree to teach English as a second language in 1978. She is fluent in French. After working at the University of Arkansas in the International Agricultural Programs office, she returned to Cornell University where she earned her M.S. in 1993 and her Ph.D. in 1999 in the Department of Rural Sociology (now the Department of Development Sociology). Her primary degree emphasis was environmental sociology, with a minor in economics. Her dissertation compared the historic and political emergence of social movements for sustainable agriculture in France and the United States in the post-World War II period. Her academic interests continue to be linked to topics related to food and agricultural systems, and she continues to collaborate with a number of colleagues in France.
Dr. Barham is currently Assistant Professor within the Department of Rural Sociology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. While at MU, she has developed a research agenda dealing with both theoretical and applied aspects of labels of origin (or appellations) for food products, known in international trade as geographical indications.  Theoretically, she is concerned with how consumers express non-market values in market exchange, and how this in turn modifies conventional market structures.  She pursues a deeper understanding of how existing label of origin systems work in practice through international case studies, and has brought what she has learned to bear on the context of rural America through a pilot project known as the Missouri Regional Cuisines Project (http://extension.missouri.edu/cuisines/). The project has developed a very active pilot region, the Mississippi River Hills, in eastern Missouri where efforts to organize producers, retailers and agri-tourism venues across a six county area has proven highly successful.  She continues to pursue this project as a comparative example to systems already established in France, and is co-editor with French researcher Bertil Sylvander of a forthcoming book on the topic entitled, Geographical Indications for Food : Local Development and Global Recognition, to be published by CABI Publishing in 2007.
Dr. Barham teaches graduate courses entitled Synthesis of Theory and Method in Sociology; Agriculture, Food and Community; and The Sociology of Globalization. She also teaches an undergraduate writing intensive course titled, The Sociology of Food and Nutrition.  In connection with her graduate class in The Sociology of Globalization, she developed a web publishing outlet for papers written by graduate students in the class on some aspect of Latinos in Missouri (http://www.ruralsociology.missouri.edu/RuralSoc/Latinos/). The papers are reviewed by a student editorial board in much the same fashion as a journal, giving the student the opportunity to learn from this publishing experience how journal submission takes place.  The papers are clearly of interest to other researchers, as well as government agencies and non-profits in the state and beyond; over the two-year period from January, 2005, through December, 2006, the website was visited 7,204 times.