About Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
Welcome to Sweetness & Ruin
A Book-in-Progress Newsletter
I’m writing a book about the history of sugar, Sweetness and Ruin: A History of Sugar from the Plantation to the Diabetes Epidemic. It is under contract with Dutton/Penguin Random House but it is still a work in progress.
A Deep Dive into History and the Present
I will be sharing some of the many stories that writing about sugar (and slavery, and capitalism, and Big Food, and healthcare, and wellness, and diabetes) touches on— some from long ago and some from today, some stories about our bodies and metabolisms, some stories about rewriting history from the bottom up, some stories about the environment.
About Me
I am a Distinguished Professor of English at Northeastern University in Boston. I have a Ph. D.