Assistant Professor, Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies
Peel 3487 Room 301
Dr. Alex D. Ketchum is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies of McGill University. She is the Director of the Just Feminist Tech and Scholarship Lab and the organizer of Disrupting Disruptions: The Feminist and Accessible Publishing, Communications, and Tech Speaker and Workshop Series. Her work integrates food, technological, queer, and gender history. Ketchum's first peer-reviewed book, Engage in Public Scholarship!: A Guidebook on Feminist and Accessible Communication (Concordia University Press 2022), examines the power dynamics that impact who gets to create certain kinds of academic work and for whom these outputs are accessible. Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the trailblazing restaurant Mother Courage of New York City, Ketchum's second book, Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses (2022), is the first history of the more than 230 feminist and lesbian-feminist restaurants, cafes, and coffeehouses that existed in the United States from 1972 to the present. Ketchum's interest in past imaginings of utopia through business creation and the implementation of communications technologies has guided her new research and third book project on the history of LGBTQ+ cyber activist organizations in Canada, the United States, and the UK from 1992 to present.
Ketchum's PhD from McGill's Department of History was supported by the FRQSC (Fonds de Recherche du Québec). Her dissertation focused on feminist restaurants, cafes, and coffeehouses in Canada and the United States from 1972-1989. She has a MA in History and Women and Gender Studies also from McGill University and a Honors BA in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Wesleyan University. She publishes in journals such as Feminist Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and Digital Humanities Quarterly. Ketchum is committed to accessible publishing practices. She is the founder of The Feminist Restaurant Project (thefeministrestaurantproject.com); the co-founder and editor of The Historical Cooking Project (historicalcookingproject.com); a website dedicated to food studies scholarship; the creator of the LGBTQ2S+ US and Canadian Archives Directory (https://www.lgbtqarchives.com); the former co-founder of Food, Feminism, and Fermentation (foodfeminismfermentation.com); the author of the trade bookettes How to DIY A Feminist Restaurant (Microcosm 2018) and How to Organize Inclusive Events: A Handbook for Feminist, Accessible, and Sustainable Gatherings (Microcosm 2020); and curator of several exhibits. You can find out more about her other writings, podcasts, zines, exhibitions, and more at https://www.alexketchum.ca.