2020 Summer Residents
Marley Beach is a fourth-year undergraduate student in the Department of History. She holds a diploma in Baking & Pastry from George Brown College, and after working in kitchens for a few years returned to combine her two passions, food and history. Her interest lies particularly in trans-national cultural exchanges and social changes as reflected in diet and cuisine.
Her residency research project, funded by the USRA, investigates trends in English language cookbooks and recipes produced or used in North America from 1600-1850. This period saw major changes in the demographics, culture, and economy of the continent. These changes affected what food was available and how that food was prepared by both colonists and Indigenous peoples, leading to the emergence of new distinctive cuisines. She will first collect a data set from cookbooks and recipes, broken down by their individual components. She then intends to use this data to create a publicly accessible database, so that it can be used for analysis not just by herself, but by other interested food historians or enthusiasts.
Raquel Burgess is a PhD student in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health. She holds a BSc (Kinesiology) and a MSc (Global Health) from McMaster University and has worked in medical education research for McMaster’s Department of Family Medicine. She is passionate about innovative ways to improve population health, specifically through health communication.
Broadly, Raquel’s research interests lie at the intersection of ‘place’ and health education. In recent times, her interests have expanded to consider novel health communication challenges and opportunities brought forward by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Emily Goodwin is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies. Her SSHRC-funded doctoral research investigates the creative work economies, neo/liberal media practices, and auto/biographical and museological conventions of the food blog genre. Emily holds a BA and MA in English Language and Literature from Brock University, and her broader research interests include digital identity work and curation, visual culture, and cultural and critical theory.
Emily’s residency project investigates the role of gourmet food institutions in creating, promoting, and circulating narratives of food blog success. Her project charts the demographic data of food bloggers recognized by Saveur magazine’s annual Food Blog Awards, in order to investigate the Awards’ promotion the digital food projects by underrepresented groups and to better understand the food blog’s reputation for hegemonic whiteness, traditional femininity, heteronormativity, and upper/middle-classness. The resultant re-mapping of Saveur’s depiction of food blog ‘success’ also supports her doctoral research, which analyzes sample food blogs selected from the Saveur Award campaigns.
Adrianna Michell is a graduate of the English & Cultural studies BA program and will be returning in the fall to complete her MA in the Cultural Studies and Critical Theory program. Her research concerns Hamilton literature and the relationships between people and place considering settlement and climate change.
Adrianna’s work is supported by an Undergraduate Student Research Award and investigates the relationships between land and the people that occupy it as depicted in narratives written by Hamilton based writers. The project considers how these authors mark connections between people and place to speculate new and better ways to relate to land. Through her Sherman Centre Residency, Adrianna will explore new digital approaches to take this work back into the community and consider how digital representations of space complicate and mediate the relationships of people to place.