People

Dr Kathleen Burke commenced appointment as a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Food Politics and Society Cluster with effect from 22 November 2023.

She received her PhD in History and Food Studies from the University of Toronto. Her PhD dissertation was runner-up for the Australian Historical Association General Thesis Prize, together with being longlisted for the best dissertation at the International Convention of Asian Scholars. Her current book project, Hearth of Empire: A History of Indian Ocean Cuisine, shows how “mestiza” women and enslaved cooks produced cuisine in colonial homes in Jakarta, Indonesia, the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company’s empire in the Indian Ocean. Her second project builds on this work by exploring trans-imperial food cultures in Portuguese and Dutch empires in the Indian Ocean, connecting historiographies which are rarely investigated together. It aims to uncover the knowledge exchanges and transformations that occurred when Indigenous American plants were transported to the Indian Ocean, situating these within finely grained epistemological contexts.