Adjunct Professor
I am an early America and Atlantic world historian. My principal focus is on food encounters between French and Indigenous peoples. Food played an essential role in the Franco-Indigenous colonial encounter in North America. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the French, who set foot on the soil of what they referred to as Acadia and New France, arrived with a food ontology strongly influenced by Greco-Roman philosophy and Christian morality. The colonial authors used these doctrines to translate and interpret Indigenous culinary practices. I revisit colonial writings from the 16th and 17th centuries and use food as an interpretive framework to analyse food’s essential role in French-Indigenous relations. The French newcomers, influenced by the Galenic principles prevalent at the time, used food not only to translate the Indigenous body but also as justification for the appropriation and dispossession of Indigenous territories.
My others research interests are missionaries in New France, early modern French culture, printers during the French Revolution and agnotology or the construction of ignorance.
‘Identité alimentaire et frontière raciale en Nouvelle-France’ in Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, Vol. 75, no. 1-2, été-automne 2021, p.41-59.
‘A root “that our French call rosary”: Foodways in Indigenous and French North America,’ Borealia, Early Canadian History, Nov. 2020.
(with Jane McLeod), ‘Religious Books, the French Revolution and the Printer Jean-Baptiste Collignon in Metz,’ Mémoires du livre/Studies in Book Culture, Volume 6, numéro 2, (printemps 2015).
(with Jane McLeod), ‘Policing printers and booksellers before and after 1789: a case study in Bordeaux,’ French History, 34.1 (2020): 22-42.
‘Contact, Confrontation, Adaptation, Corn and Wheat in 17th century New France,’ Ninth International Conference on Food and Drink Studies, Tours, France. June 2024.
‘Le goût de l’Autre; Food encounters in 17th century New France,’ Brock History Speakers Series, Brock University, Ontario. March 2024.
‘A twin land under the same constellation,’ Pierre Biard’s perception of New France’s environment,” The Environmental Impacts of Early Modern Catholic Missions in the Atlantic Space, Université du Québec à Montréal, Québec. March 2024.
‘Tadoussac 1603, un jeu de mémoire,’ Mobilité, Migrations et Circulations en Amérique Française, Congrès de l’Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française, St- Jean sur le Richelieu, Québec. October 2023.
‘The Mi’kmaw chiquebi, the case of the dismissed root,’ Food Systems and Practices: Past, Present, Future, Sheffield University, UK. June 2023.
‘Food Identity and Racial Boundaries in early New France,’ Boundaries & Encounters, Society for French Historical Studies and the Western Society for French History, Detroit, Michigan. March 2023.
‘A quintessential mode of resurrecting victims of drowning: tobacco smoke and the persistence of Indigenous practices in eighteenth century France,’ Tobacco through time: Interdisciplinary perspectives on the History and Legacy of the Use and Commodification of Tobacco, University of Leicester, UK. December 2021.
‘Épices et Tabac en Nouvelle-France; une question d’humeurs,’ Before Canada Conference, McGill University, Montréal, Canada. October 2019.
HIST4P46 FOOD and DRINK. European-Indigenous Food Encounters in Early America. (2023-2024)