Caroline Durand

Associate Professor
B.A., M.A. (Montréal); Ph.D. (McGill)
Lady Eaton College S103
705-748-1011 x 7109
carolinedurand@trentu.ca 

Research interests: 

Since more than ten years, I conducted research on cultural phenomena like popular music, cuisine, and modernity and on ideas like nationalism and liberalism. I used categories of analysis like class and gender and concepts like the liberal order, governmentality, and risk. My goal is to contribute to social, cultural, political, and intellectual history of Québec and French-Canada. I also consider my work on food and nutrition to be part of the wider field of critical food studies.

My current research analyzes how nutritional discourses and practices evolved in Québec and Canada between 1945 and the 1980s. I study how experts adapted their advice in response to deep social, cultural and political changes : the increasing presence of women in the paid workforce, new immigration currents, the concerns that dominated the creation and the direction of a provincially-funded health care system, growing environmental preoccupations, increased union activism, and the rising presence of radical political groups all marked the post-war years, the Quiet revolution and the 1970s. I also explore nutrition experts’ reactions to an increasingly industrialized and commercialized food system, as well as their role within Québec’s health services, education system, and social welfare government agencies.

Book : 

Nourrir la machine humaine. Nutrition et alimentation au Québec, 1860-1945 (Montréal, Kingston : McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 301 p.

Articles and book chapters :

• “Patates, pain et lard salé valaient-ils mieux que céréales, bacon et boeuf haché ? La diète quotidienne et la santé au Québec, 1861-1941”, Canadian Bulletin of the History of Medecine / Bulletin canadien d’histoire de la médecine, vol. 32, no. 2: 275-296 (2015 - forthcoming). 
• “Risques collectifs et responsabilités individuelles dans les conseils diététiques au Québec, 1900-1940”, Globe. Revue internationale d’études québécoises, vol. 16, no. 2 (2013) : 49-73.
• “Rational Meals for the Traditional Family: Nutrition in Québec School Manuals, 1900-1960,” in the collection Edible Histories, Cultural Politics. Towards a Canadian Food History, edited by Franca Iacovetta, Valerie J. Korinek and Marlene Epp (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012) : 109-127.
• “L’alimentation moderne pour la famille traditionnelle : Les discours sur l’alimentation au Québec, 1914-1945”, Revue de Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, no. 3, (2011) : 60-73.
• “Entre exportation et importation : la création de la chanson québécoise selon la presse artistique, 1960-1980”, Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, vol. 60, no. 3 (2007) : 295-324.

Interview:

Bien dans son assiette, Radio-Canada, June 4, 2015