L. Sasha Gora to Lead the International Junior Research Group “Off the Menu” at the University of Augsburg
07.02.2023
ProEnviron alumna and former RCC editorial director Dr. des. L. Sasha Gora will lead the International Junior Research Group “Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment” at the University of Augsburg. Sasha completed her PhD in 2020 with a dissertation on reimaginations of Indigenous food cultures in Canada. The new research group is funded by the Elitenetzwerk Bayern and comes with two PhD positions.
Starting in May 2023, the interdisciplinary research group will explore how culinary practices are affected by climate change and mass extinction, with a focus on marine life and seafood. The project will rethink the environment through a culinary lens and thereby introduce the “culinary environmental humanities.” Within six years, the group will investigate three different case studies, addressing issues of biodiversity loss and culinary extinction as well as the question of how cuisines adopt or reject “invasive” species.
After having worked as a lecturer at LMU's Amerika-Institut in 2020, Sasha joined the Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Ca' Foscari University of Venice as a research fellow. She returned to the RCC as a lecturer and editorial director in 2021 and was a resident in The Politics of Food program at Delfina Foundation, London, in 2022. Sasha currently is a KWI International Fellow in Essen, Germany.
The research group is affiliated with the international doctorate program “Rethinking Environment: The Environmental Humanities and the Ecological Transformation of Society,” which is also funded by Elitenetzwerk Bayern and is based at the Environmental Science Center WZU, Augsburg, and the RCC.
Click here to read the press release by the Bavarian ministry and here to read a newspaper article that was published in the Augsburger Allgemeine.
The RCC would like to warmly congratulate Sasha on this exciting position!