Dr. Alison Smith

Alison Smith is associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto.  Her early research focused on the production and consumption of food in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, leading to several articles and a book, Recipes for Russia: Food and Nationhood under the Tsars (NIU Press, 2008).  She has also contributed an article on national cuisines to a forthcoming Handbook of Food History, Jeffrey Pilcher, ed., to be published by Oxford University Press.

She is now working on a  project that examines social identities and social mobility in Imperial Russia, through an investigation of how individual Russians negotiated their soslovie (social estate) membership through interactions with local and central authorities. She is also taking advantage of her new Canadian location to think about Russia as a northern power, initially through co-teaching a course on, essentially,  Arctic world history.