A World in Your Cup is the online educational hub for the writing and teaching of Erika Koss.
The center of Erika’s work is to offer a deeper examination of the beverages consumed in the Global North and produced in the Global South–especially the women who make all these beverages possible.
Through the writing, teaching, and occasional public events, A World in Your Cup focuses on the “beverage crops” – coffee, cacao, tea – through the lens of the humanities and social sciences.
Recurring themes of my work include sustainability, resilience, and gender justice for all people who work to produce the beverage crops in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, particularly in the wake of two global challenges: climate change and gender inequity.
Join the journey that I hope will encourage a deeper appreciation for and understanding of the drinks so many of us never want to live without!
To read more, please visit my writing page.
Erika Koss
A native Californian now based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, Erika Koss is a writer, teacher, and traveler who sees a world in her cup of coffee through the lens of her life-long passions for literature and human rights.
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Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Erika Koss is a PhD candidate in the International Development Studies program at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. She is also a Research Associate at the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Nairobi in Nairobi, Kenya, where she lived in 2019-2020.
Erika’s research centers on the need for sustainability, resilience, and gender equity in the global coffee sector, particularly in East Africa. Her research focuses on colonialism; global governance; climate resilience; and the need for gender justice in agriculture in general and coffee in particular.
A former barista at Starbucks Coffee in San Diego and at El Recreo in Boston, Erika has traveled to the coffeelands of Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, and Hawai’i, as well as dozens of roasteries and cafés through North America and Europe.
She has taught literature, writing, and politics at several U.S. universities, including the University of San Diego, Point Loma Nazarene University, and the United States Naval Academy. In Canada, she has taught at St. Mary’s University.
Formerly she worked as a Literature Specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, DC, and at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California. Before moving to Halifax, she was an assistant dean at Northeastern University in Boston, where she created the interdisciplinary event series “The World in Your Cup: Conversations on the Politics and Culture of Coffee” that ran from September 2015 to December 2016.
During her B.S. degree at The Master’s College in Santa Clarita, California, Erika focused her studies on nutrition during which time she wrote her first paper on coffee: on the effects of caffeine for women during pregnancy. After she moved to San Diego, she earned a M.A. in English literature from San Diego State University, where most of her work focused on British poetry (especially Shakespeare and the Victorians), African literature–all through the lens of post-colonialism and feminism. Later, she earned a second M.A. degree in Political Science from Northeastern University, where her thesis examined the history and politics of coffee in Rwanda, again using feminist and postcolonial theory.
Erika is the proud mother of two sons: Everett, who joins her travels, and Ethan, who now creates his own adventures as a university student at Bennington College in Vermont and as a musician who released his first CD “To Gallery a Cloud Ground” in 2019.
From 2018-19, Erika was a member of the Creator’s Group who wrote the curriculum for the Sustainability Coffee Skills program of the Specialty Coffee Association. The course launched at the Specialty Coffee Expo in Boston in April 2019. Erika is a Authorized SCA Trainer (AST) for the “Introduction to Coffee” and “Sustainability Coffee Skills” courses.
As a writer and teacher, Erika seeks to use “A World in Your Cup” to share her life’s passions for storytelling, poetry, education, human rights – and, of course, drinks.