Tanya M. Cassidy is a Canadian sociologist who received her doctorate from the University of Chicago. Recently she has been awarded a prestigious EU Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellowship housed at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan). She continues to be an Affiliated Researcher in the Department of Anthropology at the Maynooth University in Ireland where she held her Cochrane Fellowship, as well as an adjunct Professor with the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, Criminology at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Her doctoral research, from the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, USA, concerned a socio-cultural study of gender, family and alcohol in Ireland. Since then she has lectured in both Sociology and Anthropology in Ireland, England, and Canada. In 2005 she took a career break that has resulted in a new research trajectory that connects her long-standing theorisation of consumption and identity with a more urgent public policy agenda concerning premature birth and infant feeding.