Casarina Hocevar
Ph.D. Candidate
- BA (McGill), MMSt (University of Toronto), MA (McGill)
- Email Casarina Hocevar
Current Program:
Ph.D. History (2023)
Supervisors:
Dr. Laura Madokoro, Dr. James Opp
Academic Interests:
food history, environmental history, agriculture and horticulture education, community gardens, diaspora studies, migration and immigration, labour history, food and identity, public memory, heritage sites, micro-histories, sensory studies, and much more…
Select Conference Contributions:
“‘Making something out of nothing’: remembering community in the oral histories of Italian settlers in mid-20th century, Winnipeg and Edmonton.” Memory and Narrative: Navigating Connection & Contention at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta. March 5 – 7, 2026.
“A Century of Canadian Crisis Gardening.” Fighting Scarcity and Creating Abundance: The Politics of Food and Water in Canadian History and Beyond at the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History, McMaster University, Online. June 25 – 26, 2021.
“Tending Land, Tending Appetites.” 25th Annual Graduate Interdisciplinary Conference Montreal at Concordia University, Montreal, QC. February 20, 2020.
“In the Market: A Jewish Culinary Community.” McGill-Queen’s Graduate History Conference at Queen’s University, Kingston, ON. March 3, 2019.
Teaching Experience:
Winter 2027 – HIST 3110: The Cultural History of Food – Ӱԭ University.
History of the Caribbean with Audra Diptée. Ӱԭ University, online. 2026.
Rethinking Modern Canadian History with Laura Madokoro. Ӱԭ University, in-person. 2026.
Public History: From Memory to Museum with John Walsh. Ӱԭ University, in-person. 2025.
History of the Caribbean with Audra Diptée. Ӱԭ University, online. 2025.
Animals in History with Joanna Dean. Ӱԭ University, in-person. 2024.
Environmental History of Canada with Amy Fung. Ӱԭ University, online. 2024.
History of Sport with Matthew Bellamy. Ӱԭ University, in-person. 2023.
World History 1300 – 2000 with Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert. McGill University, online. 2020.
Jewish History 1300 – 2000 with Gershon Hundert. McGill University, in-person. 2020.
Indigenous Peoples and Empires with Allan Greer. McGill University, in-person. 2019.
Description of Research:
My doctoral research, “The Shaping of Canadian Culinary Communities in Edmonton and Beyond, 1930-1980,” examines the intersections between gardening, foodways, and identity within Chinese, Italian, and Ukrainian settler communities in the Edmonton area and the role of the state in shaping food practices. I examine the tensions between what the state considered nutritious, “good” food and their desire to Canadianize new settlers through food education, and how settler families used food as a site of cultural reproduction within their family and ethnolinguistic communities.