Participants
Daniel Bender is the director of the Culinaria Research Centre at the University of Toronto and the Canada Research Chair in Global Culture. He is the author or editor of five books, including most recently: The Animal Game: Searching for Wildness at the American Zoo (2016). He is working on a new book: Travelling on their Stomachs: Around-the-World Travel and the Making of Modern Taste.
Kathleen Burke is a second year PhD student at the University of Toronto in the collaborative program on Food Studies and History. Her research focuses on how Dutch East India Company settlements in Asia were shaped by interconnected mobilities of people, plants and material culture which together contributed to the creation of a new colonial cuisine.
Simone Cinotto is Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Gastronomic Sciences Pollenzo, where he is the Director of the master’s program “Master of Gastronomy: World Food Cultures and Mobility.” He is the author of The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City (2013) and Soft Soil Black Grapes: The Birth of Italian Winemaking in California (2012); the editor of Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities (2014); and the coeditor, with Hasia Diner, of Global Jewish Foodways: A History (2018).
Hasia Diner is the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History, Professor Hebrew, Interim Director of Glucksman Ireland House at New York University. She is the author of numerous books including Global Jewish Foodways with Simone Cinotto (2018), We Remember with Reverence and Love: Americans Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962 (2009), From Arrival to Incorporation with Elliot Barkan and Alan Kraut (2007), The Jews of the United States (2004), Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (2002), and many others.
Sarah Elton is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health and teaches critical Food Systems Studies to first year students. Sarah is also the author of several bestselling Canadian books about food and sustainability.
Donna Gabaccia is Professor of History at the University of Toronto and the author of many books and articles on international migration, food, gender, Italy’s diasporas, and transnational working-class life. She is the general editor for a planned two-volume Cambridge University History of Global Migrations.
Lisa Haushofer is a historian of science, food, and economic life. Her research examines the emergence of nutritional consumer products and their role in shaping the production of nutritional knowledge. She received a Ph.D. in history of science from the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University, and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Culinaria Research Centre of the University of Toronto.
Elizabeth Hull is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Deputy Chair of the SOAS Food Studies Centre. Her research interests include agriculture, food systems, livelihoods and health in South Africa.
Carl Ipsen is an historian of contemporary history at Indiana University. He has written on Fascist population policy, issues around marginal children in the Liberal period, and the history of Italian smoking from unification to the 21st century. He is director of the IU Food Institute.
Heather Lee is an Assistant Professor of History at NYU Shanghai. She is completing a book on the history of Chinese restaurants in New York City and developing a database of historical Chinese restaurants in the United States. Her research has been featured in NPR, Atlantic magazine, and Gastropod, a podcast on food science and history. She has advised and curated exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society, the National Museum of American History, and the Museum of Chinese in America.
Sandra Mendiola is an Associate Professor of History at the University of North Texas. She is the author of Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico and a contributor to Latin@s’ Presence in the Food Industry: Changing How We Think about Food edited by Meredith E. Abarca and Consuelo Carr Salas. Her current project analyzes two mining communities in Central Mexico.
Maria Giovanna Onorati is an Associate Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the at the University of Gastronomic Sciences Pollenzo. She has authored manypublications and taught at various European universities. Her major research areas are social change from an intercultural perspective; intercultural communication, social construction of taste, new media, food and media as factors of social innovation.
Nicola Perullo is Full Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Gastronomic Sciences Pollenzo. He is currently the Director of the Doctoral Program “Ecogastronomy, Education and Society” and the Director of the “Master of Gastronomy: Creativity, Ecology and Education.” His recent works include Taste as Experience (2016) and “Haptic Taste as a Task” (2018).
Jeffrey M. Pilcher, a professor of history and food studies at the University of Toronto, is the author of Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (1998) and Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food (2012), among other books. He edits the peer-reviewed journal Global Food History.
Krishnendu Ray is the Chair of the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. He was a faculty member and the Associate Dean of Liberal Arts at The Culinary Institute of America. He is the author of The Migrant’s Table (2004), The Ethnic Restaurateur (2016), and the co-editor of Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia (2012). His most recent work is on street vending in global cities with attention to questions of law, livelihood, and liveliness of cities.
Signe Rousseau lectures in critical literacy at the University of Cape Town. She is the author of Food Media: Celebrity Chefs and the Politics of Everyday Interference (2012), and Food and Social Media: You Are What You Tweet (2012), a contributing author to a number of edited volumes and reference works on various aspects of food and media, and a member of the editorial collective of the journal Gastronomica.
Jayeeta Sharma is an Associate Professor in the Historical and Cultural Studies Department and a member of Graduate Departments of History at the University of Toronto. Her research examines food, mobilities, labor, family and gender in imperial and postcolonial spaces. She is the author of Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India (2011), which examines tea plantations and labor migration in the British Empire.
Jennifer Shutek is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University, Steinhardt, where she researches gastrodiplomacy and the entangled histories of sabich and Arab-Jewish migrations to Palestine/Israel. She obtained her B.A. in Middle Eastern and Islamic History at Simon Fraser University and her Master of Philosophy in Modern Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford.
Koby Song-Nichols is a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto in History and Food Studies. His academic interests focus on Chinese diasporic foodways, examining topics including intercultural exchange, identity, race, ethnicity, and culinary infrastructure, the cultural history of the relationship between Chinese food and popular music in the United States, and the history of Chinese restaurateurs in Montreal, Phoenix and Toronto throughout the 20th century.
Ina Vandebroek is the Matthew Calbraith Perry Associate Curator and Caribbean Program Director at The New York Botanical Garden. She has conducted ethnobotanical research and outreach for 19 years, studying the relationship between plant diversity and community livelihoods in collaboration with indigenous and local farming communities in Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and New York City. Ina is an Editor for several ethnobiology journals, including the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, Economic Botany, and Advances in Economic Botany.