番茄社区

Originally from the Sipekne’katik area of Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia), I completed a BA Hons. (Political Science) at Dalhousie; an MA (International Development Studies) at the University of East Anglia; and a doctorate in Modern History at the University of Oxford. I have taught at UVic since 1994.

My main research interests are food insecurity and food sovereignty, particularly in colonized spaces and in the era of climate crisis; colonialism; and the intersecting histories of poverty, gender, and race. I am Principal Investigator on a SSHRC-funded, transnational and community-engaged research project to examine historical and contemporary causes of food crises, and powerful community-level responses, in four settings: South Africa, Colombia, Indigenous communities in southern and northern Canada, and refugee communities in Jordan. More details of this project, under the working title “Four Stories About Food Sovereignty: Transnational Crises and Local Action,” can be found at My other major project, one of the “four stories,” explores the lived experience of rural poverty for generations of women in South Africa during and after apartheid. I am collaborating with community members to collect the life histories of older women in communities in Limpopo Province, examining the quest for food sovereignty within a national and global context antithetical to its pursuit; household economies; inter-generational politics; and shifting relations to the state among smallholder farmers. The major knowledge mobilization from this project to date is the award-winning 2017 documentary film The Thinking Garden. The political and temporal urgency of the food sovereignty research has placed on the back burner an earlier project on processes of racialization (including through food) and the making of poverty in colonial Nova Scotia.

I teach comparative and Canadian history at the introductory level, and comparative British colonial history, South African history, and historiography at the senior undergraduate and graduate levels. In 2014 I offered The Colonial Legacies Field School in South Africa. In addition to teaching, research, and community engagement, I served for six years as the History Department's Graduate Director and have served as Acting Associate Dean in the Faculty of Graduate Studies.

The Thinking Garden Press Kit

Community Engagement 

I have supervised graduate students in many areas, including early modern and modern colonial histories (North America, Caribbean, India, Southern and West Africa, South Pacific); First Nations histories; cultural theory; and travel literature.

• Keith Smith (MA)
• Pasi Ahonen (PhD – inc.)
• Sylvia Olsen (MA)
• Sarah Eustace (MA)
• Georgia Sitara (PhD)
• Mrinalinhi Greedharry (MA)
• Robin Grazley (MA)
• Nicholas May (MA)
• Sara Sharun (MA)
• Lisa Helps (MA), Bodies Public, City Spaces: Becoming Modern Victoria, British Columbia, 1871-1901
• Patrick Chassé (MA), “Hereticks for Believing the Antipodes”: Scottish Colonial Identities in the Darien, 1698-1700
• Nicholas Melchin (MA), “How frigid Zones reward the Advert’rers Toils”: Natural History Writing and the British Imagination in the Making of Hudson Bay, 1741-1752
• Meleisa Ono-George (MA), The Planters’ Fictions: Identity, Intimacy and the Negotiation of Power in Colonial Jamaica
• Crystal Fraser (MA), Cultural Perplexities: Non-Aboriginal Representations of Dene Women In the Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
• Ashley Forseille (MA), Reading Love Between the Lines: Religion, Courtship, and Correspondence in the Salvation Army, 1906-1910
• Elizabeth Clemo (MA), “Professional Do-Gooding”: British Women's Philanthropy in Colonial India, 1870-1900
• Ezekiel Gow (MA), The Potato and the Nail: The Fort Langley Post Journals and Europeanization on the Banks of the Fraser River 1827-1830
• Lesley Golding (MA), Blacks in Fur Country: Black Participation in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British North American Fur Trade
• Faelan Lundeberg (MA), The People’s War in N’wamitwa, South Africa, 1989-1994
• Gina Mowatt (MA), A Brief History of 19th-20th century Genocidal Indian Education in British Columbia and Oral History of Gitxsan Resistance and Resurgence
• Darren Reid (MA), The Aborigines' Protection Society as an Imperial Knowledge Network: Black South African Letters to the APS, 1879-1888
• Theresa Mackay (PhD), Food culture, gender, and knowledge transfer in 19^th-century Scotland
• Jacquelyn McClure (MA), Representing Emily Carr in public history