Els W. Woudstra received her Ph.D. in English from Rice University in Houston, Texas, in the field of twentieth-century literature and sensory studies (2022). She is currently a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Rice University, where she teaches first-year writing courses that draw on her scholarly expertise in sensory studies, food studies and science and technology studies. Her research broadly focuses on the artificial construction of sensation in twentieth and twenty-first culture and technology, and the quantification of taste through industrially-produced foods. She is currently working on a book-length project, Technologies of Taste: Artificial Flavors and the Quantification of the Senses after World War II, which examines the standardization of subjective taste experience through the production, commercialization, and consumption of artificial flavors.

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