It is a great delight to join the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH) as a visiting scholar from late May to mid-June 2023. I have followed the cod to Norway and during my stay in Oslo I am looking forward to exchanging ideas with OSEH’s dynamic and interdisciplinary community, especially those thinking about and with animals and water, art and the environment.
I am a cultural historian and a writer with a focus on the intersections between food studies, the environmental humanities, and contemporary art. In May 2023 I joined the University of Augsburg in Germany, where I lead the junior research group “Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment.” It seeks to spotlight culturally shaped eating practices as key sites of environmental transformation and to consider cuisine as a unique entry point for contextualizing the sixth mass extinction and the future of planetary health. Engaging with the intimate relationship between human appetites and environmental change, “Off the Menu” highlights three case studies: cod’s historic and contemporary entanglements with colonization and the environmental crisis across the Atlantic; culinary extinction and the ethics of endangered foods; and how cuisines accept or reject “invasive” species. Taken together, they investigate the emergence of climate-conscious eating practices.
During my time at OSEH, I will work on following cod’s cultural and culinary, economic and environmental traces. I am also interested in learning about projects in Oslo that combine food, art, and activism.
Before joining Augsburg, I received my PhD from the Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and held postdoctoral fellowships at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen. Based on my doctoral work about the history of Indigenous restaurants in the lands now called Canada, for which I received the 2021 Bavarian American Academy Dissertation Award, I am currently working on my first book, titled Culinary Claims. As part of my academic work, I regularly collaborate with artists, chefs, and cultural institutions.
For more information about my work, please visit my website.