Tyler J. Snelling, is a doctoral candidate in the Rhetoric, Culture, Engagement track.

By combining food studies with digital humanities and health rhetoric, he traces how food related activities organize people’s relationships, daily habits, and labor. His dissertation studies early digital tools that people used to exchange recipes as a way to understand the impact of web-based food practices an identity, status, and the United States. This research both sheds light on why millions of recipes now circulate through the web and addresses the broad forces like taste, class, and race that drew people into digital culture as they adopted networked technologies. Through this historical work and more contemporary projects tracing anti-sugar rhetoric, storytelling in zines, and nutritional advice, Snelling paints a complex portrait about how food structures daily struggles and systems of power.

He complements these research interests by being an avid cook and viewer of food YouTube.