Nathalie Cooke

M. Nathalie Cooke (born 27 December 1960) is a Canadian literary scholar and professor in the Department of English at McGill University whose work spans Canadian literature, women's life writing, and interdisciplinary food studies. She is known for research that examines menus, cookbooks, and culinary ephemera as historical documents illuminating social values, cultural exchange, and everyday life. She is known for research that examines menus, Canadian Literary Fare, which received the Gabrielle Roy Prize for literary criticism, and Tastes and Traditions: An Illustrated Journey Through Menu History (2025). In 2025, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Reviewers have emphasized her analysis of menus as sites where aspiration, constraint, and memory intersect, especially in contexts of scarcity or displacement.

In studies of Canadian food culture, Cooke has challenged the notion of a single national cuisine. She described Canadian foodways as “culinarily multilingual,” shaped by successive waves of migration and ongoing cultural exchange.

Cooke has also investigated tensions between regional food traditions and national standardization in the twentieth century, particularly through print and broadcast media. Her research on Canadian food personalities such as Kate Aitken and Jehane Benoît considers them as cultural intermediaries who helped construct shared food narratives while preserving regional diversity.

She has also researched the transnational history of the tea industry, based on archival materials to trace historical links between South Asia, Britain, and Canada.

Career Cooke is a professor in the Department of English at McGill University, where she has held a number of senior academic and administrative roles. She served as associate dean of arts (research and graduate studies) from 2006 to 2010 and as associate university provost (academic staff and priority initiatives) from 2010 to 2013.

She is the founding editor of Cuizine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures, a peer-reviewed open-access journal established in 2008 and published by McGill University Libraries.

In 2023, Cooke held a visiting fellowship at the Centre for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Victoria. In 2024, she was a visiting research fellow at the University of Glasgow, where she conducted archival research in the Scottish Business Archives.

In 2025, Cooke was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Selected work

Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Biography. Toronto: ECW Press, 1998. Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion.Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. Cooke, Nathalie, ed. What's to Eat? Entrées in Canadian Food History. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009. Cooke, Nathalie, Shelley Boyd, and Alexia Moyer. Canadian Literary Fare. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023. Cooke, Nathalie. Tastes and Traditions: An Illustrated Journey Through Menu History. London: Reaktion Books, 2025.

Awards Gabrielle Roy Prize from the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures for Canadian Literary Fare (2023) Society for the History of Natural History President's Medal for "The Gwillim Project" (2022)