Elizabeth Vibert

Dr. Elizabeth Vibert, a 2019/2020 CFGS Faculty Fellow, is an UVic historian whose research focuses on gender, poverty, colonialism, and food systems. Originally from Nova Scotia, she completed a BA Hons. (Political Science) at Dalhousie; and MA (International Development Studies) at the University of east Anglia; and a doctorate in Modern History at the University of Oxford. She has been teaching at the University of Victoria since 1994.

She is director of the SSHRC-funded research project “Four Stories About Food Sovereignty: Transnational Crises and Local Action,” which draws together food producers and researchers from four continents to examine historical and contemporary food crises, and community responses in an era of climate crisis. She co-produced and wrote the award-winning documentary film The Thinking Garden, and has written or edited three books and numerous articles on colonial history, Indigenous-settler relations, and South African history. Her other major project, one of the “four stories,” explores the lived experience of rural poverty for generations of women in South Africa during and after apartheid. She is collaborating with community members to collect the life histories of older women in communities in Limpopo Province, examining the quest for food sovereignty within a national and global context antithetical to its pursuit; household economies; inter-generational politics; and shifting relations to the state among smallholder farmers. 

Her main research interests are food insecurity and food sovereignty, particularly in colonized spaces and in the era of climate crisis; colonialism; and the intersecting histories of poverty, gender, and race.