Dr. Judith C. Williams
Cultural Anthropologist | Race, Food, and Restaurant Labor
Author of Maître Divas and Misogynoir (forthcoming, UNC Press)
I am a cultural anthropologist, educator, and writer whose work explores the cultural politics of food, hospitality, and labor. I am currently a faculty member at Furman University, where I teach courses in the anthropology of food, race, and ethnicity, including Black foodways.
Before entering academia, I spent decades working in the restaurant industry, moving through roles from cocktail server to restaurant manager, chef-owner, and chef instructor. These experiences continue to shape how I think about power, race, and inequality in hospitality spaces.
My work is grounded in the lived experiences of restaurant workers and the social worlds they navigate. I am particularly interested in how people make meaning through their labor and the strategies they develop to move through institutions that were not originally built for them.
More broadly, my research sits at the intersection of the anthropology of food, Black feminist thought, and labor studies, with a focus on documenting the cultural knowledge and everyday practices that sustain restaurant life.
Research
My research examines restaurants as social institutions where race, gender, class, and power are negotiated through everyday interactions. While restaurants are often understood as spaces of food and leisure, they are also workplaces shaped by expectations about appearance, personality, and belonging.
Through ethnographic research, I explore how hospitality is produced as a form of aesthetic and emotional labor, and how workers navigate the demands of an industry structured by inequality. I am particularly interested in how identities are read, interpreted, and managed within these spaces, and how workers respond to those readings in ways that are strategic, creative, and often constrained.
By centering the perspectives of workers themselves, my work highlights the cultural knowledge that sustains restaurant life and the often invisible forms of labor that make service appear seamless.
Current Book Project
Maître Divas and Misogynoir
(forthcoming, UNC Press)
Maître Divas and Misogynoir is an ethnography of Black women working in front-of-house restaurant positions in major U.S. dining cities.
Drawing on interviews and fieldwork in places such as Miami and New Orleans, the book examines how race, gender, sexual orientation and embodied aesthetics shape the labor of hospitality. Restaurants often present service as effortless, but the atmosphere diners experience is carefully produced.
By centering the experiences of Black women working the door, the dining room, and the floor, this project reveals the hidden negotiations behind restaurant service and the strategies workers develop to navigate an industry structured by inequality.
This project builds on my broader research into the social worlds of restaurants, extending my focus on labor, identity, and power by examining how Black women navigate visibility, performance, and inequality in front-of-house roles.
Contact
For speaking engagements, collaborations, or media inquiries, please use the form below or email directly at: Judith.Williams@Furman.edu
© Judith C Williams 2026