Student Affiliate
Amanda Whittaker is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. She completed her BA at McGill University and her MA in history at Concordia University.
Her 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.
Her project is a study of métissage that explores the changing place of food within, across, and between borders. It aims to collect and assess the life stories of migrants arriving in Montreal in the post 1960 period; it will draw on the stories found between the pages of migrants’ manuscript cookbooks as well as their oral history testimonies. The notion of “emotional transnationalism” (as in the migrant’s multidirectional and multilayered attachments and connections to homeland and hostland) provides the central conceptual framework of the dissertation. In contrast to the specific immigrant group or single community study so popular in migration history, this study will instead consider a multiplicity of racial and ethnic migrant subjects.
