Chef Professor

What happens when professional chefs hang up their aprons for a life in academia? Structured as both autoethnography and critique, The Chef Professor exposes how chef pracademics (individuals who identify as both practitioners and academics) negotiate the fraught relationship between practical expertise and academic legitimacy within research-intensive universities. Following the first author’s career transition from executive chef to scholar, this book invites readers to reimagine an academic life that honors, rather than exhausts, the practitioners who bring their craft into the university.