Francesco Buscemi is an Adjunct Professor for the MA in Food Studies at The American University of Rome (AUR). He has two national academic qualifications, the first in sociology of culture, and the second on media studies. He currently teaches media studies, media writing and scriptwriting at the Catholic University of Milan; Francesco also writes about food culture and the food system in the Italian newspaper Domani.
Francesco Buscemi from 2023 to 2024 he was a member of the research group Future Eating at the University of Turin, where he focused on the cultural impact of food technologies, specifically cultivated meat. His research is based on a constructivist framework, an inductive approach and analytical tools such as semiotic analysis, cultural history, storytelling and political economy. His teaching draws on learning by doing and game-based learning. His experience includes teaching at the University of Stirling, Bournemouth University and Insubria University, Como. He was a member of the Semiotic Society of America, where he also chaired various debates. Francesco has also been a script, comics and TV writer for about twenty years and has recently published a novel.
From 2015 to 2018, he co-founded and was a member of the research group Foodkom, at the University of Orebro, focusing on the mediatization of food and the meal. From 2016 to 2017, Francesco was also a postdoc researcher on food and the territory at IUAV University of Venice, where he interviewed and applied storytelling analysis to people working at different stages of the food system, to understand how food culture and food businesses can support new forms of sustainable tourism. In 2013 he was the recipient of the Santander Research Grant Fund for a study on how the Nazi propaganda represented meat and food in general to demonize its enemies, which he carried out at the Goethe University in Frankfurt.
Selected Publications
Buscemi, F. (2024). For a Biosemiotic of Cultivated Meat: Cell-based Food and its Positioning between Nature and Culture. Scienza e Filosofia, 31: 39-52.
Buscemi, F. (2023). Chicken without Chicken, Sausage without Sausage: Rhetorical Remediations of Vegetarian and Vegan Foods Recalling Meat. In Cristina Hanganu-Bresch (ed.), The Rhetorical Construction of Veganism and Vegetarianism. London: Routledge.
Buscemi, F. (2023). A War of Colors: Cold War Food Advertising in US Newspapers and Magazines, 1946-1960. In Mark Boulton e Tobias Gibson (ed.) Red Reckoning: The Cold War and the Transformation of American Life. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press
Buscemi, F. (2022). Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda: Political History of Italian Food TV. Bristol: Intellect.
Buscemi, F. (2021). The Aryan race of animals: The role played by color in the visual semiotics of Nazi propaganda. The American Journal of Semiotics, 37, 3–4, pp. 329–350.
Buscemi, F. (2021). No Country for Old Food? Food Network and the Making of Italian Food Culture. In Emily Newman and Emily Witsel (eds), The Food Network Recipe: Essays on Cooking, Celebrity and Competition. Jefferson (NC): McFarland, pp. 224-239.
Buscemi, F. (2018). From Body Fuel to Universal Poison: Cultural History of Meat 1900-The Present. Dordrecht: Springer.
Buscemi, F. (2018). The sin of eating meat: Fascism, Nazism and the Construction of Sacred Vegetarianism. In Proteins, Pathologies and Politics: Dietary Innovation and Disease from the Nineteenth Century, ed. David Gentilcore and Matthew Smith. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 137-147.
Buscemi, F. (2018). The Ancestral Room of the State? Scotland and the UK on Jamie's Great Britain. Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 42(3) 258–274.
Buscemi, F. (2016). Passing on Recipes or Passing an Examination? Food and Foucault in two Web Forums in Italy and Britain. Comunicazioni Sociali. n. 3, pp. 491-502
Buscemi, F. (2016). The Writer who Foresaw Slow Food: Joseph Conrad and the Morality of Eating. In J. Garsha (ed) Critical Insights: Joseph Conrad. New York: Grey House Publishing, pp. 162-179.
Buscemi, F. (2016). Edible Lies: How Nazi Propaganda Represented Meat to Demonise the Jews. Media, War and Conflict, 9(2): 180-197.
Buscemi, F. (2016). The Carnivorous Mission of the Celebrity Chef. In Food for Thought: New Critical Perspectives on Veganism and Meat Consumption, Jodey Castricano and Rasmus R. Simonsen eds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 331-348.
Buscemi, F. (2015). How 'Il Caffè' Sospeso' Became 'Suspended Coffee'. European Journal of American Culture, vol. 34-2, pp.123-136.
Buscemi, F. (2015). New Meat and the Media Conundrum with Nature and Culture. Lexia: Journal of Semiotics, vol. 19-20, pp. 419-434.
Buscemi, F. (2014). Television As a Trattoria: Constructing the Woman in the Kitchen on Italian Food Shows. European Journal of Communication, 29-3: 304-318.
Buscemi, F. (2014). From Killing Cows to Culturing Meat. The British Food Journal, vol. 116, no. 6, pp. 952 – 964.