Dr. Ian Mosby

Dr. Ian Mosby is an award-winning historian of food, Indigenous health and the politics of Canadian settler colonialism. He has published articles in journals including Social History of Medicine, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Policy Options, and the Journal of Rural Studies as well as in the Globe and Mail and the Literary Review of Canada.

Dr. Mosby’s research uncovering a series of government-sponsored nutrition experiments conducted primarily on Indigenous children attending Indian residential schools has received widespread national and international media attention. He is currently continuing this work with a project examining the long-term health impacts of hunger and malnutrition in residential schools as well as a SSHRC-funded project exploring the history of human experimentation in Indigenous communities during the 1960s and 1970s.

In 2016, Dr Mosby was named one of the “53 most influential people in Canadian food” by the Globe and Mail. In addition, his first book, Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front (UBC Press, 2014), was awarded the Canadian Historical Association’s 2015 Political History Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2016 Canada Prize in the Humanities by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

"Especially with the recent launch of the Yellowhead Institute, Ryerson has really started to move to the forefront of the kind of community-based, policy-driven research that has come to define much of my current scholarship and approach to Indigenous history and the politics of Canadian settler colonialism."