Recent Talks, Lectures, and Presentations

Teaching & Lectures

Courses Taught & Developed:

Food Origins, Cultural Traditions, and Rituals (Lecturer & Course Developer ): In this course, students gain insight into how social and ethnic identities are revealed and evolve in everyday food rituals and symbols. We explore and appreciate a diversity of food rituals while also tracing the historical origins of common eating habits and how they have shaped societies around the world. An appreciation for culture and rituals will help build relationships with local residents and tourists. Relationship building contributes to, and can be the hallmark of, a successful food tourism business that is respected and trusted by a variety of communities and individuals with diverse cultural backgrounds.
- Course Enrolment: 30
Introduction to Digital Media (Lecturer & Course Developer): An introduction to the many forms of multimedia with a focus on applications for the food and drink as well as the overall hospitality industry. The intended uses, benefits and strengths of each type of media and how each type can be used as a platform in food are discussed. This course provides students with the essential skill of evaluating and utilizing the appropriate types of media to communicate specific messages and values to the intended audience.
- Course Enrolment: 25

Courses Taught & Developed:

The Intellectual Origins of the Contemporary West (2016-2017) (Course Developer & Lecturer): This course is a survey of the major ideas in Western Civilization and the societies, cultures, and people, which helped to form them. Students will learn about the past by reading and discussing the great works of philosophy, history, and literature from antiquity to our contemporary world. The course starts with creation ideas in Hebrew thought and Greek myth and ends with Romanticism, Marxism, liberalism, modern feminism, colonial exploitation, and the destructive theories behind Nazism and fascism. cStudents will study the roots of modern society in the political and educational ideals of the ancient Greek city-states, Roman notions of justice and power, the Christian transformation of pagan antiquity, Islam and science, monks and knights in medieval Europe, and the rebirth of the arts and religion in the Renaissance and Reformation. This course reveals how the past is very much alive in our contemporary society; an inheritance for better or worse most evident in ideas about politics, morality, religion, and education.
- Course Enrolment: ~185

The Middle Ages (2012–2017) (Course Developer & Lecturer): This course explores the Middle Ages, spanning approximately from 300 to 1500 CE. A Eurasian rather than a limited European scope defines the scope of this course, as topics will include regions as far east as Persian’s Asian frontier, as far south as Africa, as far west as Ireland, and as far north as Scandinavia and the Vikings. This course will not only emphasize the political transformations of early medieval power; students will explore a range of themes that allow us to contextualize the post-Roman period. This course will highlight topics of religion, language, economics, and art; all of which may serve as prisms to understanding the transformation between what we term the ancient world to medieval civilization.
- Course Enrolment: ~175

2009-2012: Lecturer & Tutor, Oxford University (History Faculty)

2012-2015: Marjorie Oliver McLean Postdoctoral Fellowship, Queen’s University

2012-2103: International Society for the History of Rhetoric Fellowship

2011-2012: Past & Present Junior Research Fellowship, Institute of Historical Research, London, UK