Jayeeta Sharma
Associate Professor
Biography
Jo (Jayeeta) Sharma (M.Phil Delhi, PhD Cambridge, FRGS) is an Associate Professor of Food and Environmental Studies at the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences (DPES) of the University of Toronto. She is a founding member of the Culinaria Research Centre. She holds graduate appointments at the Department of History, the School of the Environment, and at DPES. She is a faculty affiliate of the SDGs Scholars Academy, School of Cities, and the Centre for Critical South Asian Humanities. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and an elected Board Member of the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS). She is a founding co-editor of the ‘Culinaria’ book series (University of Toronto Press), and editor of the ‘Empires in Perspective’ history book series (Routledge 2016-). She is also co-editor of the Global Food History journal.
From the University of Toronto, Jo is the founder-director of the Feeding City Lab which documents and supports socially just, culturally relevant, and ecologically sustainable food infrastructure, and socio-ecological transitions worldwide: /projects/feedingcity/.
With Professor Marney Isaac (DPES), Jo co-directs the Sustainable Food & Farming (SF3) Cluster of Scholarly Prominence: . Her own research focuses on food sovereignty, urban foodscapes, food justice, sustainable food systems, agrobiodiversity, and mountain ecologies. She is the author of Empire’s Garden (Duke University Press 2012; EAP 2017, Internet Archive 2021), and the forthcoming Mountains of Empire (University of California 2025).
Jo welcomes enquiries from graduate students committed to actionist-research and community-engaged scholarship on global topics connected to food justice and food sovereignty which would complement the work of the Feeding City and SF3 teams.
Research Interests
- Cities and Foods
- Food Justice
- Food Sovereignty Movements
- Agroecology and Food Studies
- Sustainable Food and Farming Actions
- Environmental Histories of the Global South