Jeffrey Pilcher

Research Interests

He is currently working on two major projects. The first is dedicated to mapping and analyzing histories of multicultural foods in Toronto, from the First Nations to the contemporary age of global migration. This SSHRC-supported project is designed to facilitate active participation from student researchers, who leverage their classroom learning as well as linguistic and cultural competencies to record the homeland foodways and cultural adaptations of Toronto and Scarborough’s diverse immigrant communities. Research materials, including interactive historical maps, stories of culinary icons, and oral histories are publicly available on the project website:

https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/projects/torontofood/

His second current project examines the world history of beer over the past two hundred years, following the spread of European lager through networks of trade, migration, and empire. The research moves between the global and the local to explore how European brews became situated within the drinking cultures of Mexican pulque, Japanese sake, and South African sorghum beer, among others.