Camille Bégin is an award-winning writer and historian of food, memory, and the senses in North American history.

Her interdisciplinary research explores the relationship between taste, race, and place to understand how history and the senses shape how we eat today. Her award-winning first book, Taste of the Nation: The New Deal Search For America’s Food, part of the Studies in Sensory History series at the University of Illinois Press, won the Association for the Study of Food and Society Best Book Award in 2017.

Bégin’s research projects use public history and digital humanities to deepen our understanding of the role of food and taste in the making of global cities. 

She is currently on leave from her job as manager of the City of Toronto’s historical plaques program and at work on a food memoir entitled Crumbs: A Trail of Taste and Illness.  

Born and raised in France, she has called Canada home for close to two decades. She graduated with a PhD in History from the University of Toronto and was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University. She has taught Global History courses at the University of Toronto Scarborough and given talks and guest lectures in the US, Canada, and France.