Dedicated student office hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30-1:30pm, and by appointment

Mark Anthony Arceño is a food and environmental anthropologist. His dissertation, "Changing (Vitivini) Cultures in Central Ohio, USA, and Alsace, Eastern France: A Comparative Study of Terroir and the Taste of Place,” includes article chapters that have been published in Anthropology of Food and Practicing Anthropology. Using the French notion of terroir as a conceptual framework, his ongoing research investigates the social-ecological system of place-based wine production in Ohio, USA, and Alsace, France, to examine how winegrowers understand, adapt, and articulate changes in their vitivinicultural (i.e., winegrowing) landscapes. Mark Anthony is especially interested in how foods and drinks of geographic origin help individuals articulate sociocultural and political senses of self and belonging in times of change (climatic or otherwise). While in France, Mark Anthony worked with the LAE research team (Laboratoire Agronomie et Environnement) at the Grand Est-Colmar research center of the INRA, now known as the INRAE (French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment). The final phase of his French research was supported by a Humanities and Social Sciences "Make Our Planet Great Again" Chateaubriand Fellowship, which is sponsored by the Cultural Services of the Embassy of France.

Mark Anthony previously completed his M.A. thesis at Ohio State, "On Consuming and Constructing Material and Symbolic Culture: An Anthropology of Pictorial Representations of Food-Based Dietary Guidelines (FBDGs)," and his B.A. Honors thesis at Albion College, "Monolingualism and Catholic South African Multiethnolinguistic Identity." He has also taught in the Department of Anthropology ("Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” and "Crisis! An Anthropological Perspective of Global Issues") and, while a student at Albion, studied abroad as part of the Boston University Paris Internship Program (interning at AFS Vivre Sans Frontière), and the School for International Training: Multiculturalism and Social Change program in Cape Town, South Africa. For several summers after graduating from Albion, he co-/led high school summer programs throughout France, and also conducted an ethnographic exploratory study on halal food consumption, as part of his Master's program.

Outside of teaching FRIT 3061: Mediterranean Food Cultures, Mark Anthony is the Academic Program Coordinator in the Department of Comparative Studies, where he also teaches COMPSTD 4420: Cultural Food Systems and Sustainability during the spring term. He is also the Lecture Series Team Leader of the Anthropology Public Outreach Program, the Chapter Leader of Slow Food Columbus, and is active on social media in his quest to continue "Learning through Food" by way of cooking/baking from scratch (if the macaron tie is any indication), restaurant reviews, etc.

Selected Recent Publications

Arceño, Mark Anthony. 2026. “On Being Influenced: Consuming, Producing, and Performing Recipes on Social Media.” The Recipes Project (special issue on modern personal recipe collections) https://doi.org/10.58079/165xq 

Arceño, Mark Anthony, Nicholas C. Kawa, Michelle Menkoff, Prabhjot Singh, and Christine D. Sprunger. 2025. “A spectrum of climate change adaptation: reactive and proactive responses to extreme weather in annual and perennial cropping systems in Ohio.” Environmental Research: Food Systems 2: 045008. https://doi.org/10.1088/2976-601X/ae1b09 

Arceño, Mark Anthony. 2022. "Vignerons and the Vines: Mediators of Place-based Identity in Alsace, France." Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale 30(1): 24-44. https://doi.org/10.3167/saas.2022.300103

Arceño, Mark Anthony. 2021. "On Winegrowers and More-than-Human Workers in Ohioan and Alsatian Vineyards." Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment 43(1): 36-46. https://doi.org/10.1111/cuag.12266

Thiollet-Scholtus, Marie, Mark Anthony Arceño, Mateus Valduga, and François Sarrazin. 2020. "Typing winegrower profiles to ease agroecological change in viticulture practices in the Loire Valley, France." Journal of Wine Research 31(4): 265-82. https://doi.org/10.1080/09571264.2020.1855579

Arceño, Mark Anthony. 2020. “Variability and Change: Terroir and the Place of Climate among Ohio Winegrowers.” Anthropology of Food S14. https://doi.org/10.4000/aof.10723