The JHI is excited to announce our 2022-23 New Media and Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow—Jaclyn Rohel. Jaclyn held the Mellon-funded Community-Engaged Early Career Fellowship at the JHI in 2021-2022 and we are delighted to welcome her back again during our Labour theme year.
Jaclyn Rohel has a PhD in Food Studies from New York University. At U of T, she is an Early Career Fellow at the JHI, and she also contributes to the Feeding City Lab and the new UTSC Sustainable Food and Farming Futures (SF3) Clusters of Scholarly Prominence Program. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Culinaria Research Centre. Jaclyn’s interdisciplinary work focuses on food provisioning, the marketplace, and the ethics of hospitality in diverse cities. When she was midway through her PhD, she worked with collaborators in New York and around the world to launch the City Food Research Group, a public scholarship project dedicated to the study of street vending in the global North and South. Her work on street food, public culture, and culinary mobilities has appeared in Food, Culture, and Society, Global Food History, and Gastronomica. She has taught a range of different Food Studies courses including, most recently, Food Writing and Photography. A member of Gastronomica’s Editorial Collective, Jaclyn works with the journal’s Food Phenomena creative cluster and manages the Reviews section. She also produces and co-hosts the new Gastronomica podcast series on Heritage Radio Network.
Fellowship Project
Culinary Labour and Community Connections
Jaclyn will explore labour and the ethics of hospitality in the building of inclusive, diverse, and equitable foodways in Toronto following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her research on public culture and pathways of food provisioning in the city – including small enterprises, farmers’ markets and online markets, as well as emergency food supports – will examine the relationship between culinary labour and community connections. Moreover, as a collaborator on the SSHRC-funded Connections project Voices from the Food Frontlines: Pandemic & Beyond, Jaclyn will work with the Feeding City Lab to develop a podcast storytelling toolkit for students and lab affiliates, supporting a co-created series of multimedia narratives and interviews; this public-facing initiative will connect the stories of local stakeholders and grassroots advocates who have worked in food provisioning sectors to multidisciplinary research insights on the pandemic.