The CTA is happy to welcome Shayan Lallani aboard

Here we are again- our team continues to grow! As such, we are happy to welcome Shayan Lallani to the Culinary Tourism Alliance as our newest Research & Engagement Specialist.

Shayan is a cultural historian, traveller, and lifelong foodie. Born in Florida to a Pakistani family, his parents encouraged him to eat as a way of understanding his own culture and to interact with the diverse foodways around him in multicultural cities such as Miami, Orlando, and eventually Toronto.

In 2011, Shayan’s interest in food tourism was peaked when he went on a Caribbean cruise with his family and began wondering about the cuisines being offered aboard. This lead him to pursue his Masters of Arts in Food History at the University of Toronto (a big diversion where he’d thought to go first, law school).

From there, Shayan had truly found his passion for food and tourism and went on to pursue his PhD at University of Ottawa, studying how the US-Caribbean mass-market cruise industry used dining experiences to secure a middle-class American clientele increasingly partaking in global travel during the late twentieth century.

Shayan’s work on the cruise industry has taken him across the Caribbean and Latin America, and to Alaska, California, and North Carolina. His research has been awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship and has appeared in leading scholarly journals such as Food, Culture & Society and Journal of Tourism History.

We are so happy to have Shayan’s depth of knowledge and passion for food history aboard our team. Welcome!