Dr. Elizabeth Vibert
Position
Contact
Credentials
BA (Dal), MA (E Anglia), DPhil (Oxon)
Area of expertise
African History, World History, Race and Gender, Sustainable Economies and Food Systems, Community Responses to Climate Change
Office Hours
Summer 2024: No office hours
Bio
Originally from the Sipekne’katik area of Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia), I completed a BA Hons. (Political Science) at Dalhousie; an MA (International Development Studies) at the University of East Anglia; and a doctorate in Modern History at the University of Oxford. I have taught at UVic since 1994.
My main research interests are food insecurity and food sovereignty, particularly in colonized spaces and in the era of climate crisis; colonialism; and the intersecting histories of poverty, gender, and race. I am Principal Investigator on a SSHRC-funded, transnational and community-engaged research project to examine historical and contemporary causes of food crises, and powerful community-level responses, in four settings: South Africa, Colombia, Indigenous communities in southern and northern Canada, and refugee communities in Jordan. More details of this project, under the working title “Four Stories About Food Sovereignty: Transnational Crises and Local Action,” can be found at www.fourstoriesaboutfood.org/ My other major project, one of the “four stories,” explores the lived experience of rural poverty for generations of women in South Africa during and after apartheid. I am collaborating with community members to collect the life histories of older women in communities in Limpopo Province, examining the quest for food sovereignty within a national and global context antithetical to its pursuit; household economies; inter-generational politics; and shifting relations to the state among smallholder farmers. The major knowledge mobilization from this project to date is the award-winning 2017 documentary film The Thinking Garden. The political and temporal urgency of the food sovereignty research has placed on the back burner an earlier project on processes of racialization (including through food) and the making of poverty in colonial Nova Scotia.
I teach comparative and Canadian history at the introductory level, and comparative British colonial history, South African history, and historiography at the senior undergraduate and graduate levels. In 2014 I offered The Colonial Legacies Field School in South Africa. In addition to teaching, research, and community engagement, I served for six years as the History Department's Graduate Director and have served as Acting Associate Dean in the Faculty of Graduate Studies.
The Thinking Garden trailer from French film festival
Website of transnational food justice research
Selected publications
Books/Films:
- The Thinking Garden. Documentary 2017 (Dir. Christine Welsh; Co-producer/writer/research Elizabeth Vibert).*
* Matrix Award Winner; translated into French, German, Arabic. PRESS KIT
* UVic REACH Award for Excellence in Knowledge Mobilization.
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- Out There Learning: Critical Reflections on Off-Campus Study Programs, co-edited by D. Curran, C. Owens, H. Thorson, E. Vibert. (University of Toronto Press, Fall 2019)
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Traders' Tales: Narratives of Cultural Encounters in the Columbia Plateau. University of Oklahoma Press, 1997 and 2000.*
*Winner of the AHA/CHA Corey Prize, 1999. Honourable mention, CHA Macdonald and Ferguson Prizes, 1998.
- Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native History, co-edited by Jennifer Brown and Elizabeth Vibert. Broadview Press, 1997; University of Toronto Press, 2003.
Select recent articles, chapters, papers:
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“Towards just food futures: Divergent approaches and collaboration across difference,” themed issue co-edited by M. Rosol, E. Holt-Giménez, L. Kepkiewicz, and E. Vibert, Canadian Food Studies 9 (2), 2022: [editorial] 1-30.
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“Transformation or the next meal? Global-local tensions in food justice work,” E. Vibert, B. Gill, M. Murphy, A. Pérez Piñán, and C. Puerta Silva, Canadian Food Studies 9 (2), 2022: 226-248.
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“Mutual aid in a global food crisis: South African women work together,” The Conversation 5 April 2022.
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“Translocal Lives: Gender and Rural Mobilities in South Africa, 1970-2020.” Nov. 2020 Politikon, 47 (4), 2020: 460-478.
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“The View from the Farm: Gendered Contradictions in Global Goal Setting for Hunger,” with Astrid Pérez Piñàn. Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 20 (4), 2019: 436-50.
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“Power in Place: Dilemmas in Leading Field Schools to the Global South,” with Kirsten Sadeghi-Yekta. In Curran, Owens, Thorson and Vibert, eds. Out There Learning: Critical Reflections on Off-Campus Study Programs (University of Toronto Press, 2019).
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“Gender, Resistance, and Resilience at a South African Women’s Farm,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 34 (2), 2016: 252-267.
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“Loyalist Historiography,” short essay for J. and M. Bumsted, ed., A History of the Canadian Peoples, 5th edition 2016.
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“Wretched Fishers and Manly Men: Meanings of Food in the Columbia Plateau,” in Kristin Burnett and Geoff Read, eds., Aboriginal History: A Reader (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2015).
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“Rural Mothers and a Politics of Resilience in South Africa,” paper presented at International Federation for Research in Women’s History, Sheffield UK, August 2013.
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“Cape Breton, 1843: Improvement and Degeneracy,” Victorian Review 36 (1), 2011.
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"The Contours of Everyday Life: Food and Identity in the Plateau Fur Trade," in Laura Peers and Carolyn Podruchny, eds., Gathering Places: Essays on Aboriginal and Fur Trade Histories (Vancouver, UBC Press, 2010).
Courses
| HSTR 101A | 10 Days that Shook the World |
| HSTR 230A | Canada to Confederation |
| HSTR 470 | Colonial Legacies Field School in South Africa |
| HSTR 485B | Making 'Race' in the British Atlantic World |
| HSTR 500 | Historiography |
| HSTR 503A | 17th - 19th Century Canadian History |
| HSTR 517 | Cultural History and Theory |
Grad students
I have supervised graduate students in many areas, including early modern and modern colonial histories (North America, Caribbean, India, Southern and West Africa, South Pacific); First Nations histories; cultural theory; and travel literature.
- Keith Smith (MA)
- Pasi Ahonen (PhD – inc.)
- Sylvia Olsen (MA)
- Sarah Eustace (MA)
- Georgia Sitara (PhD)
- Mrinalinhi Greedharry (MA)
- Robin Grazley (MA)
- Nicholas May (MA)
- Sara Sharun (MA)
- Lisa Helps (MA), Bodies Public, City Spaces: Becoming Modern Victoria, British Columbia, 1871-1901
- Patrick Chassé (MA), “Hereticks for Believing the Antipodes”: Scottish Colonial Identities in the Darien, 1698-1700
- Nicholas Melchin (MA), “How frigid Zones reward the Advert’rers Toils”: Natural History Writing and the British Imagination in the Making of Hudson Bay, 1741-1752
- Meleisa Ono-George (MA), The Planters’ Fictions: Identity, Intimacy and the Negotiation of Power in Colonial Jamaica
- Crystal Fraser (MA), Cultural Perplexities: Non-Aboriginal Representations of Dene Women In the Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- Ashley Forseille (MA), Reading Love Between the Lines: Religion, Courtship, and Correspondence in the Salvation Army, 1906-1910
- Elizabeth Clemo (MA), “Professional Do-Gooding”: British Women's Philanthropy in Colonial India, 1870-1900
- Ezekiel Gow (MA), The Potato and the Nail: The Fort Langley Post Journals and Europeanization on the Banks of the Fraser River 1827-1830
- Lesley Golding (MA), Blacks in Fur Country: Black Participation in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British North American Fur Trade
- Faelan Lundeberg (MA), The People’s War in N’wamitwa, South Africa, 1989-1994
- Gina Mowatt (MA), A Brief History of 19th-20th century Genocidal Indian Education in British Columbia and Oral History of Gitxsan Resistance and Resurgence
- Darren Reid (MA), The Aborigines' Protection Society as an Imperial Knowledge Network: Black South African Letters to the APS, 1879-1888
- Theresa Mackay (PhD), Food culture, gender, and knowledge transfer in 19th-century Scotland
- Jacquelyn McClure (MA), Representing Emily Carr in public history