Carole Counihan is professor of anthropology at Millersville University, one of fourteen universities in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. She has been active in anthropology, gender, and food studies for over two decades and has conducted ethnographic research in Sardinia and Florence, as well as in the United States.

She recently completed Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence (Routledge 2004). Based on food-centered life histories with twenty-three Florentines, this book offers a portrait of Florence across the twentieth century by describing changes in the beliefs and behaviors surrounding food. Counihan is also author of The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning and Power (Routledge 1999), a collection of essays on the ways that making, eating, and thinking about food reveal culturally determined gender-power relations in diverse societies. She is editor of Food in the USA (Routledge, 2002) and Food and Culture (with Penny Van Esterik, Routledge, 1997). With her husband, anthropologist Jim Taggart, Counihan is currently doing a long-term life history project on food and gender identity in a Mexicano community in Colorado's San Luis Valley. She received a 2005-2006 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for her book based on this research, tentatively titled Women's Stories of Food, Identity and Land in the San Luis Valley of Colorado.

Carole Counihan is co-editor-in-chief of the scholarly, interdisciplinary, international journal Food and Foodways and she is on the editorial advisory board of Slow: the journal of the international slow food movement.

She has a BA in history from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She teaches in Women's and Latino Studies as well as in anthropology. Her courses include Food and Culture, Ethnographic Methods, Latino Cultures in the US, Latino Culture through Film, Male/Female, and Gender, Race, and Class. She is a visiting professor at the University of Gastronomic Sciences Masters Program in Colorno (Parma), Italy.