Amanda Whittaker

Amanda's scholarly appetite has motivated her interest in gender studies, food history, and the collaborative practice of oral history. Her research focuses on the experience of migration, forced or voluntary, and the development and preservation of migrants’ foodways, particularly in the Montreal, Quebec area.

In her doctoral thesis, she will examine the cultural messages found between the pages of homemade cookbooks and through informal food-talk interviews, in which family history, stories of migration, and moments of change come together. Her research pays particular attention to emotional transnationalism, as in the migrant’s multidirectional and multilayered attachments and connections to homeland and hostland. In contrast to the specific immigrant group or single community study so popular in migration history, her dissertation research will instead consider a multiplicity of racial and ethnic migrant subjects.

Her professional experience includes teaching at UTSC and Marianopolis College, and Guest Lecturing at UTSG.