Hello, thanks for visiting my website!
The website together my research in food and communication, popular culture, politics, and identity.
As a discourse analyst, I am interested in understanding our culture, ourselves, others and the world around us through the analysis of images and language in a variety of texts that relate to food, from cookbooks to TV cooking shows, and from lifestyle media to policy documents.
Such texts, although seemingly trivial, shape our ‘common-sense’ understanding about important questions of our national, class and other identities. These impact how we live our lives and how we relate to others, from how we think about food to what we eat.
Some of the questions that my research explores are:
- How does food media shape our understanding of taste and social class?
- How do ideas of ‘national foods’ change over time?
- What was the role of early television in promoting new foods and lifestyles to people across Europe in the 1960s?
- How do public narratives about food influence who feels included, heard or marginalised?
- How can research help people think differently about questions around taste, obesity, food access and identity?
For my detailed expertise, see the section Interests. This is where you’ll find many of my full texts available for download, if you are interested in exploring further.
Recent
NEW BOOK SERIES: Food, Media, and Communication
The series, which will be published with Peter Lang in English or French, will be the first book series that will specifically address food from a communications perspective. It will be edited by Ashli Stokes and myself. If you have a monograph, edited collection or something shorter in mind, please get in touch with me, even if it is just an idea!
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: Conference on Food & Communication
Our 5th conference on Food and Communication will take place in September 2027 in Bayreuth, Germany. The CfA is now out, please check the conference’s website here – and see you in Germany?
WORK IN PROGRESS: Communicating Scotland Through Food: From Devolution to Possible Futures
We are currently working on a new edited book – currently under review. The volume specifically focuses on the role of media, language, and communication broadly in shaping Scotland’s vision about itself and others, addressing a notable gap in discussions around Scotland’s relationship to food. Edited by Ashli Stokes, Ana Tominc and Maryam Ishaq. More
LATEST ARTICLE: Living Language in Between: Slovene, English and the Pain of Imperfection (2026)
This article was published in March 2026 in a wonderful collection of essays entitled ‘Central and Eastern European Women Academics in the UK: Making Britain Home’ (eds A. Rydzik and M. Gebbels, Routledge) which explores lives of more than 30 CEEC women academics who migrated to the UK in the last 20 years, since the 2004 enlargement of the EU. It is full of inspirational encounters that document women’s migrant lives in the UK, often reminiscent of my own stories and experiences: from difficult beginnings, to cultural misunderstandings, personal dilemmas but also successes, all set against the challenging circumstances the UK went through in the last decades, from austerity to Brexit and the pandemic, all significantly impacting UK higher education. My contribution reflects on the role of language in production of knowledge, both in terms of what language to choose to write in as plurilingual scholars as well as the joys of learning the foreign language pragmatics – for example, how not to be too direct – and always feeling kind of imperfectly ‘in Between’.
Research Highlight
EDITED BOOK: Food and Cooking on Early Television in Europe (2022)
This edited collection focuses on food and cooking on early television in Europe. From East Germany to Portugal, the book covers nine European countries as it explores the place of food on early television, its programmes, audiences and content. For more about this book, see here, where you can also download the Introduction and listen to the podcast about this fascinating topic.
The book was shortlisted for the MeCCSA Outstanding Achievement Awards 2023, recognising its unique and niche contribution to television history studies.
Spotlight from the Past
INTERVIEW with Ruth Wodak
Back in 2010, when I was still a PhD student at Lancaster University, I interviewed my then supervisor, Distinguished Professor Ruth Wodak, about her work, career and life, but the interview unfortunately never got published. I’ve recently read it again and almost instantly I was transported back to her office in what was then the Linguistics and English Language Department, remembering our conversations about my PhD, her academic experiences, especially as a woman, and critical discourse studies, the area of linguistics that Ruth Wodak has shaped from the beginning – and continues to shape it today. How did her work come about and what influenced it? Does she really speak Serbo-Croatian? and Is she too diplomatic to be critical? and more you can learn from this interview:
Ana Tominc 