Marlene Epp

About:

Marlene Epp is a Canadian historian whose scholarship interests focus on Mennonite studies, immigrants and refugees, women and gender, the history of peace and nonviolence, and the history of food and culture.
 

Selected Publications:

• Eating Like a Mennonite: Food and Community Across Borders. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024.

• "Responding to ‘War’s Havoc’: The Relief Work of Mennonite Women.” In Sarah Glassford and Amy Shaw, eds. Making the Best of It: Women and Girls of Canada and Newfoundland during the Second World War. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2020, 163-79.

• With Franca Iacovetta. “Beyond Sisters or Strangers: Feminist Immigrant Women’s History and Rewriting Canadian History.” In Nancy Janovicek and Carmen Nielson, eds. Reading Canadian Women’s and Gender History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019, 225-54.

• Refugees in Canada: A Brief History. Booklet #35 Immigration and Ethnicity in Canada / L’Immigration et l’ethnicité au Canada. Canadian Historical Association, 2017.  

• “‘The dumpling in my soup was lonely just like me’: Food in the Memories of Mennonite Women Refugees.” In Donna R. Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta, eds. Borders, Conflict Zones, and Memory: Scholarly Engagements with Luisa Passerini. London: UK, Routledge, 2017. Republished from Women’s History Review 25, no. 3 (June 2016): 365-81.

• Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History. Editor, with Franca Iacovetta. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016, second edition.

• “Peppernuts and Anarsa: Food, Religion, and Ritual.” Anabaptist Witness 2, no. 2 (November 2015): 87-90.

• “Eating Across Borders: Reading Immigrant Cookbooks.” Histoire Sociale/Social History 96 (May 2015): 45-65.
• Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History. Co-edited with Franca Iacovetta and Valerie Korinek.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.
• Mennonites in Ontario: An Introduction. Waterloo: Mennonite Historical Society of Ontario, 1994, 2002, 2012.
• Mennonite Women in Canada: A History. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2008, 378 pp.
• Women Without Men: Mennonite Refugees of the Second World War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Reprinted 2003.
• “Catching Babies and Delivering the Dead: Midwives and Undertakers in Mennonite Settlement Communities.” In Myra Rutherdale, ed. Caregiving on the Periphery: Historical Perspectives on Nursing and Midwifery in Canada. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010, 61-83.
•  “Sexual Violence in War: Mennonite Refugees during the Second World War.” In Stephen J. Rockel and Rick Halpern, eds. Inventing Collateral Damage: Civilian Casualties, War, and Empire. Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2009.
•  “The Semiotics of Zwieback: Feast and Famine in the Narratives of Mennonite Refugee Women.” In Marlene Epp, et al., eds. Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
• “Midwife-Healers in Canadian Mennonite Immigrant Communities: Women who ‘made things right’.” Histoire Sociale / Social History 80 (November 2007): 323-44.
   

Web Features and Articles

• Blog: Anti-racism includes unlearning the history of the land, July 14, 2020

• Maybe We Need Another World Refugee Year, June 19, 2019

• Remembering an Old War in a New Way, September 7, 2017

• Muslims, Mennonites and Covered Heads, April 29, 2015