People

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z  

Please email Joela Jacobs (joelajacobs@arizona.edu) if you would like to be added or have updates.

A

Giovanni Aloi is an Art Historian of modern and contemporary art. He studied History of Art and Art Practice in Milan and moved to London in 1997 to further his studies at Goldsmiths University where he obtained a Postgraduate Diploma in Art History, a Master in Visual Cultures, and a Ph.D. on the subject of natural history in contemporary art. Aloi currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sotheby’s Institute of Art New York and London, and Tate Galleries. He has curated art projects involving photography and the moving image, is a BBC radio contributor, and his work has been translated into Italian, Chinese, French, Russian, Polish, and Spanish. His first book titled Art & Animals was published in 2011 and since 2006 he has been the Editor in Chief of Antennae, the Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. His new books Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene will be published by Columbia University Press in January 2018 and Why Look at Plants?, a co-authored book dedicated to plants in contemporary art will be published in June 2018 by Brill. You can contact him at galoi@saic.edu.

B

André S. Bailão is a PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil. His research deals with the scientific, textual and artistic histories of the Cerrado — a vast mosaic of woodlands, shrublands, savannas and grasslands originally covering 20% of the Brazilian territory. He researches scientific illustrations, texts, travel reports and literature, maps, as well as scientific debates and controversies around landscapes, vegetation, plants, climate change, and the Anthropocene in the fields of Brazilian studies, the history of science, ecocriticism, and visual culture with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For his master’s thesis at the University of São Paulo, he has conducted research in the fields of anthropology of science and science & technology studies, regarding climate-change science production in Brazil. You can contact him at asbailao@gmail.com.

Robert W. Barrett, Jr., is Associate Professor of English, Medieval Studies, Theatre, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is author of Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195-1656 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009) and assisted Vin Nardizzi in editing the “Premodern Plants” special issue of postmedieval (volume 9, issue 4, November 2018). His current research project uses medieval English theatre, critical plant studies, and animacy theory to answer Mark Cody Poulton’s question, “Can a play about anything so passive as a plant make for good theatre?” (Spoiler alert: the answer is “yes.”) You can contact him at rwb@illinois.edu.

Martin Bartelmus is a Postdoctoral Scholar of German Literary, Media, and Cultural Theory at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. He studied German Literature, Philosophy, Political and Social Studies at Julius Maximilians University Würzburg and received his PhD in Media and Cultural Studies as part of the DFG graduate program “Materiality and Production” from Heinrich Heine University. His PhD-Thesis is entitled Cultural Born Killer: Poetics of Killing around 1900. Before joining the department of German Literature at Heinrich Heine University for his current postdoctoral position, he worked as a curator for the Museum of Natural History of the Benrath Palace and Park Foundation and as a freelancer for the Julia Stoschek Collection. He is interested in Animal and Plant Studies, killing in literature and film, French theory, Object-Oriented Ontology, and literature without humans. You can contact him at martin.bartelmus@hhu.de.

Kate Bastin is an Assistant Professor of French at Eckerd College and a scholar of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature and culture. Her research interests include early modern French literature, women’s writing, animal studies, plant studies, and birth and maternity in Old Regime France. Her current book project is on the simian in Old Regime France. Her second project on birth and maternity is currently focused on breastfeeding and wetnursing in late seventeenth-century fairy tales; she is beginning a project on plant studies in these female-authored tales. You can contact her at bastink@eckerd.edu.

Anna-Lisa Baumeister is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon and a Dissertation Fellow at the Oregon Humanities Center. Her research is situated at the intersection of German studies, ecocriticism, and the history of science, with a specific focus on the long eighteenth century. She is interested in questions concerning the classification and representation of life, the emergence within modern German thought of environmental concepts such as vegetation and Umwelt, and the role of literary semantics in imagining climate futures. You can contact her at baumeist@uoregon.edu.

Christina Becher is a Ph.D. Candidate in German Philology and “EUmanities”-Fellow at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne (University of Cologne). She holds Master’s degrees in German Philology as well as in Cultural Poetics of Literature and Media from the University of Münster. Her dissertation project explores the various functions of vegetal-human hybrids in literature and visual arts: Interested in hybrids from the 20th century to present time, she focuses on their emergence in poetological, feminist, and ecological contexts. You can contact her at christina.becher@uni-koeln.de.

Sarah Benharrech is an Associate Professor of French at the University of Maryland and a specialist of 18th-century French novelist, journalist, and playwright Marivaux. She has also prepared the critical edition of Enlightenment writer Tiphaigne de La Roche’s Questions relatives à l’agriculture et à la nature des plantes (Complete Works, Classiques-Garnier, forthcoming), in which he argued that plants were animals. She has recently worked on François-Joseph Hunauld’s vegetal imagery in The New Treatise on Physics (1742), his fictional narrative of a fantastical travel to the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. She has published the first account of the life and work of previously unknown Mme Dugage de Pommereul (1733-1782), a woman botanist student of A.-L. de Jussieu and assistant to André Thouin at the botanical garden of Paris. She is currently working on a book project, tentatively entitled The Dreams of Plants, where she is examining how modes of vegetative reproduction informed narrative forms in 18th-century french fictions at the crossroad of literature and science. You can contact her at sbenharr@umd.edu.

Clara Bosak-Schroeder is an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and an affiliate of History, Medieval Studies, and Comparative and World Literature. Clara works at the intersection of classics and the environmental humanities, with a focus on Greek and Roman historiography and technical literature. Her book project, Other Natures, argues that Greek ethnographies—descriptions of non-Greeks—criticize Greek environmental practices. A second project investigates the dialogue between classical scholarship and early modern primatology. Clara recently published “The Religious Life of Greek Automata,” in Archiv für Religionsgeschichte (2016) and “The Ecology of Health in Herodotus, Dicaearchus, and Agatharchides,” in The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds (2016). You can see her work at https://www.theburningboy.com and contact her at cbosak@illinois.edu.

Frederica Bowcutt is a botany professor at The Evergreen State College where she has taught in interdisciplinary programs since 1996. Her courses include Botany: Plants and People, European Ethnobotany in Historical Context, Global Studies: Plants and Empire, and Picturing Plants. She also serves as Director of the Evergreen Natural History Museum. Her books include The Tanoak Tree: An Environmental History of a Pacific Coast Hardwood published by University of Washington Press. This book examines the complex history of cultural, sociopolitical, and economic factors affecting people’s radically different perceptions of this common hardwood tree. She is a contributor to the forthcoming A Cultural History of Plants from Bloomsbury and The Cultural Value of Trees: Folk Value and Biocultural Conservation from Routledge. Her current research is focused on cultural landscapes and the intersection between economic botany and feminist economics. She holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley and an MA from the University of California at Davis (UC Davis), both in botany. Her Ph.D. in ecology is from UC Davis. You can contact her at bowcuttf@evergreen.edu.

Helga G. Braunbeck is Professor of German Studies at North Carolina State University, where she has also served as Assistant Dean for Interdisciplinary Studies. She holds degrees from the University of Tübingen, the University of Oregon, Eugene, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. In addition to articles on various topics, she has published two books: Autorschaft und Subjektgenese: Christa Wolfs Kein Ort. Nirgends. Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1992, and Figurationen von Kunst, Musik, Film und Tanz: Intermedialität bei Libuše Moníková. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2018. She regularly teaches classes on “Green Germany” and “German Environmental Literature, Art and Film” and has now also shifted her research pursuits to ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. So far, her publications in these areas are: a review of Floriographie: Die Sprachen der Blumen. Edited by Isabel Kranz, Alexander Schwan, and Eike Wittrock. Paderborn: Fink, 2016. Monatshefte 110.1 (Spring 2018), 117–120. A review article of seven books on German Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature: Recent German Ecocriticism in Interdisciplinary Context. Monatshefte 111.1 (Spring 2019), 117–135. A review of Ökologischer Wandel in der deutschsprachigen Literatur des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts. Neue Ansätze und Perspektiven. Edited by Gabriele Dürbeck, Christine Kanz and Ralf Zschachlitz. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018. Monatshefte (forthcoming in late spring/early summer 2020). And an article on “Zarte Empirie, Schreiben mit grüner Tinte und die agenzielle Natur: Klaus Modicks Novelle Moos,” Literatur für Leser 2/17 (August 2019), 23–41. An article on “Das Blatt” for a handbook on plants, and another on gardens and gardening in recent German literature are under review. You can contact her at helga_braunbeck@ncsu.edu.

Kate Brelje is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. Her research involves ethics of care and plant life. In her dissertation, she argues for an ethic of care that can include plants. She also addresses the practical implications of such a view by analyzing case studies that provide distinct contexts for human-plant relationships: aesthetic, use, and wild. Her Master’s Thesis (Philosophy, Colorado State University) was a comparative analysis of Kant’s aesthetic judgment of Taste and Yogācāra Open Presence Meditation. She is currently the Research Assistant for the Center for the Humanities at Temple (CHAT). You can contact her at katherine.brelje@temple.edu.

Alessandro Buccheri is a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratoire d’Excellence “History and Anthropology of Knowledge, Technologies and Beliefs” (HASTEC) in Paris. He works on Theophrastus’ Enquiry into plants (4th century BCE), the earliest (known) Greek systematic study of the vegetal realm and a part of the collaborative effort to initiate a new style of enquiry into nature, which took place in Aristotle’s school. Alessandro is particularly interested in Theophrastus’ use of metaphor and analogy as an intellectual tool as well as in the establishment of botanics as an independent field of study (The project, in French, is available here). He is also preparing a monograph on the botanical metaphors used to conceptualize the workings of the human body and of kinship ties in Archaic and Classical Greek poetry (8th-5th century BCE). You can contact him at alessandro.buccheri@ephe.sorbonne.fr.

Gino Bühler is a photographer and graphic designer interested in the intersection of light, plants, and photography. Recently, he presented his photographic portraits of local plants at the Düsseldorf Photo+ Biennale for Visual and Sonic Media 2022, shown as “Photosynthese: Urformen des Lebens” at Schönewald Gallery. After completing a graphic design apprenticeship in Zurich, he worked in several constellations in Düsseldorf.  He found his way back into photography after a health-related sabbatical in 1976/77 with a town paper on visual arts and society in Düsseldorf. Since 1983, he has been working as a photographer for artists, advertisement, and many other different projects together with Ann Weitz. You can contact him at info@annweitz.de.

Anna Burton is a Lecturer in English Literature and Early Career Researcher at the University of Derby. Anna’s research is concerned with representations of trees and woodland in nineteenth-century literature and culture; her book, Trees in Nineteenth-Century Fiction: The Silvicultural Novel, was published with Routledge in 2021, and her current project focusses on the literary and cultural history of tree planting and care-taking in the English Lake District. Alongside Dr. Amanda Blake Davis, she also co-leads the “Romantic Trees: The Literary Arboretum, 1740-1840” project and the interdisciplinary “Tree Talks” seminar series. You can contact her at A.Burton@derby.ac.uk.

Daisy Butcher is a Doctoral Student working on the Open Graves, Open Minds Project at the University of Hertfordshire. Her study focuses on depictions of the feminine in gothic and weird fiction, including particular discussion of female mummies, vampires, and the killer plant. She has published peer-reviewed e-journal articles on female monstrosity and has a book with the British Library, called Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic, which was released in August 2019. You can contact her at daisy2205@yahoo.co.uk.

C

Sandra Calkins is Assistant Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Free University of Berlin. She is currently finishing a manuscript entitled Growing with Bananas: Plants, Health and Humanitarian Biotech in Uganda and has started a new research project on affect and human-plant relationships at the Botanical Gardens and Botanical Museum in Berlin. She has published in Medicine Anthropology Theory, Anthropological Quarterly and Social Studies of Science. You can contact her at sandra.calkins@fu-berlin.de.

Paco Calvo (PhD, University of Glasgow, 2000) is a Professor of Philosophy of Science, and Principal Investigator of the Minimal Intelligence Laboratory (MINTLab) at the University of Murcia (Spain). His research interests range broadly within the cognitive sciences, with special emphasis on plant intelligence, ecological psychology and embodied cognitive science. He uses time-lapse photography to explore perception-action and learning in plants. His scientific articles have appeared in Annals of Botany, Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, Frontiers in Neurorobotics, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Journal of the Royal Society, Plant, Cell & Environment, Plant Signaling & Behavior, Scientific Reports, and Trends in Plant Science, among other journals. His book, Planta Sapiens, is coming out with Little, Brown & Co. in the UK (August 2022), and with Norton in the US (March 2023). You can contact him at fjcalvo@um.es.

David Carruthers is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, where he studies the Environmental Humanities and Contemporary North American Literatures. His dissertation, entitled “Becoming-Sorcerer: The Plant, the Power, and the Posthuman Periphery,” studies the eco-phenomenological plant-human intersections as represented in post-Cold War literature and their relationship to understandings of ecological crisis. He has published several scholarly articles and reviews in publications including Mosaic, Canadian Literature, The Bull Calf Review, and The Goose. He is the co-editor of the edited collection, Perma/Culture: Imagining Alternatives in an Age of Crisis, and the Book Reviews Editor for The Goose, the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada’s scholarly publication. You can contact him at david.carruthers@queensu.ca.

Paul Chartrand is an artist who works with constructed habitats built from found objects and integrated living components, blurring the boundaries between natural and cultural forms. His projects focus on sculpture and drawings of these idiosyncratic ecosystems, where many disparate elements become new collective communities of agency. Paul finds inspiration in the blurry definitions of culture and nature; intending for his work to foster dialogue regarding this problematic dichotomy. Recently, he has been growing plants in the forms of words and phrases to conflate human/non-human binaries. These projects have been inspired partly by the idea of “reading” or “digesting” of artwork or other visual information; integrating into the minds and bodies of those consuming them to create new collective wholes. Paul completed his Master of Fine Arts degree at Western University with Ontario Graduate Scholarships and SSHRC funding. He has exhibited at galleries including the Niagara Artists Centre, Xpace Cultural Centre, Younger Than Beyonce Gallery, Boarding House Gallery, Satellite Gallery, Idea Exchange, the CAFKA Biennial, and Y+ Contemporary. You can contact him at lpaulchartrand@gmail.com.

Olga Cielemecka is “The Seed Box. Environmental Humanities Collaboratory” postdoctoral researcher at the Unit of Gender Studies, Linkoping University in Sweden; deputy director of a research group “Posthumanities Hub” (Linköping University); and a chair of a working group on new materialisms and politics of a COST Action of “New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’.” Trained in philosophy, she works at a junction of environmental humanities and feminist scholarship to re-think the concepts of the subject, community, and collaboration in the context of advanced capitalism and environmental change. In June 2017, together with Marianna Szczygielska, she organized at Linköping University in Sweden a conference “Plantarium: Re-Imagining Green Futurities,” that critically explored human relationships to botanical life; Olga and Marianna are currently working on an edited collection of essays on this topic. In her recent project, Olga looks into a massive and ongoing logging project of the Bialowieża Primeval Forest in Poland to consider forest imaginaries along with possibilities of future and survival in times of political and environmental crises. You can contact her at olga.cielemecka@gmail.com.

Kyra Sanchez Clapper is Assistant Professor of History at Bethel University. Her research interests include French Romanticism, ecocriticism, and garden/landscape studies. She has a Ph.D. in History and two Master’s degrees in Modern European History and French Language and Literature from the University of Memphis. Her current project is a book manuscript on flora exchange and botanophilia correspondences in the transatlantic during the Revolutionary Era (1750-1850). You can contact her at clapperk@bethelu.edu.

Amy Coombs is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Chicago, where she works in the early modern Britain, history of science, and political economy programs. She holds and MS in Forestry and Natural Resources from Purdue and broadly integrates economic history, archival studies, GIS, and plant science. Her work focuses on the use of archival materials for landscape reconstruction and the role of history in informing forest restoration and public policy. You can contact her at acoombs@uchicago.edu.

Elizabeth Crachiolo is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California – Davis. Her dissertation, “Vegetable Feelings: Plants, Passions, and Knowledge in Early Modern England,” examines the figure of the sentient plant as a particularly fertile locus of knowledge production in early modern English natural history and literary writing. You can contact her at ecrachiolo@ucdavis.edu.

D

d-o-t-s is a research-led nomadic studio active in the field of editorial and curatorial production. Founded in 2014 by Laura Drouet [FR] and Olivier Lacrouts [IT/FR], the studio’s investigations focus on alternative social dynamics, off-the-record stories and experimental design perspectives. Defined by the participatory and interdisciplinary approach, d-o-t-s’ work spans from writing and exhibition-making to hands-on workshops. Entitled Plant Fever, the studio’s latest project (a book and an exhibition) proposes to look at the future of design from a new vegetal perspective, moving from a human-centered to a phyto-centered design. You can contact them at hello@studiodots.eu.

Joelle Dietrick is an artist who produces work about wanderlust, global trade, extinct plants, and eco-friendly homes by women architects. Her paintings, drawings, and animations have been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Transitio_MX in Mexico City, TINA B Festival in Prague and Venice, Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, MCA San Diego, Long March Space Beijing, ARC Gallery Chicago, and Soho20 New York. She has attended residencies at MacDowell, Künstlerhaus Salzburg, Anderson Ranch, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Banff, and the School of the Visual Arts and received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the University of California, Florida State University, the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program. You can contact her at jodietrick@davidson.edu.

Savannah DiGregorio is an MA candidate in English at the University of Mississippi. Her research examines plant subjectivity, autonomy, and agency, as well as relationships and interactions between plants and humans, particularly in the regional area of the American South. Other research interests include critical animal studies, posthumanism, and ecocriticism. You can contact her at sdigrego@olemiss.edu.

Giulia A. Disanto is Associate Professor of German Literature at the University of Salento, in Italy. Her research interests include German literature from the nineteenth century to the present, notably with regard to the interplay between literature and history (war and peace studies), in avant-garde studies (in particular: dadaism, the literary work of Kurt Schwitters), in ecocriticism, in Jewish and exile literature, in the literary genre of poetry. In addition to articles on various topics, she has recently co-edited the books: “Das Publikum wird immer besser:” Literarische Adressatenfunktionen vom Naturalismus bis zur Avantgarde (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau, 2020) and Lyrik-Experimente zwischen Vormoderne und Gegenwart (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2020). She translated and edited some works of Kurt Schwitters in Italian (inter alia: The Zoological Gardens Lottery). She is currently translating and editing a work of Raoul Schrott in Italian and dealing with the topic of desertification in German-language literature. She is assistant editor of Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment. You can contact her at giulia.disanto@unisalento.it.

Ariane Dröscher teaches History of Science at the University of Trento. She has studied history and biology at the universities of Hamburg and Bologna and received her PhD with a dissertation on the history of cell biology. She worked as a researcher and lecturer of the history of biology, philosophy of science, science policies, and science communication at several Italian universities. She has published four monographs, two edited volumes, one translation, over one hundred essay and papers, and she is currently writing a book on plants and politics during the 1848 revolution in Padua. You can reach her at coraariane.droscher@unibo.it.

Gabriele Dürbeck is Professor of Literature and Culture Studies at University of Vechta since 2011. Her main research fields are travel literature and the South Pacific, postcolonial studies, disaster literature and environmental humanism. She has authored Einbildungskraft und Aufklärung: Perspektiven der Philosophie, Anthropologie und Ästhetik um 1750 (1997) and Stereotype Paradiese: Ozeanismus in der deutschsprachigen Südseeliteratur, 1815-1914 (2007). She is co-editor of Postkoloniale Germanistik: Bestandsaufnahme, theoretische Perspektiven, Lektüren (2014); the first German-speaking introduction into Ecocriticism (2015); Metzler-Handbuch Postkolonialismus und Literatur (2017); Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture (2017); Ökologischer Wandel in der deutschsprachigen Literatur des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts (2018). She is principal investigator of the DFG-project “Narrative des Anthropozän in Wissenschaft und Literatur” (2017-2019). You can contact her at gabriele.duerbeck@uni-vechta.de.

E

Evgenia Emets is an artist and a poet working with forests, ecology, biodiversity, and community through her visual works, poetry, installation, performance, film, artist’s books, and large-scale ecological artworks. Evgenia moved to Portugal in 2017, the year some of the most destructive forest fires connected with the presence of monocultures in the country. This motivated her to explore through artistic means the roots of these issues and to start the art project Eternal Forest, which is an ongoing multidisciplinary art initiative to create forest sanctuaries across the world—biodiverse areas to be protected in perpetuity, created through art and ecology, and supported by local communities. The project has been exhibited across Portugal and in the UK. Evgenia’s art has been exhibited in many prestigious institutions and received multiple awards. Her visual works and artist’s books can be found in museums, libraries, and private collections in Russia, UK, Europe and Japan. You can reach her at emetsjane@gmail.com.

Cornelia Ertl completed her MA in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin. Her MA thesis explores the social and ecological outcomes of the Interoceanic Highway in the Peruvian Amazon region, built upon longterm field research. She currently conducts her PhD field research in a project on affect and human-plant relationships at the Botanical Garden in Berlin, focusing on the affective dynamics between plants and gardeners based on daily routines and sensory encounters. Her research interests include multispecies studies, human-plant relations, notions of Umwelt, infrastructure, and sensory ethnography. You can contact her at cornelia.ertl@fu-berlin.de.

F

Maura C. Flannery was a Professor of Biology at St. John’s University in New York until her recent retirement. She has a Ph.D. in science education from New York University. For 30 years she wrote the “Biology Today” column for The American Biology Teacher. Maura was a Carnegie Scholar (2000-2002) and is the author of two books and numerous articles dealing primarily with the people who do biological inquiry. She has had a long-term interest in the visual aspects of botany and particularly in preserved plant collections called herbaria, including their history, their uses, and their future.  She is involved in the Herbaria 3.0 project and blogs at Herbarium World. She can be reached at flannerm@gmail.com.

Claudia J Ford is an ethnobotanist who has enjoyed a career in international development and women’s health spanning three decades and all continents. Dr. Ford holds an undergraduate degree in biology, graduate degrees in midwifery, business administration, creative writing and environmental studies. Claudia has been in academia for over twenty years, currently as Professor and Chair of the department of Environmental Studies at SUNY at Potsdam. She is writing a book on African American ecological knowledge, and has published a book, a textbook, and numerous articles including: “Medicinal Plant Stories in the Herbal Archives: Ethnobotanical Sources, Silences, and Challenges,” JAHG 20, no. 1 (Spring 2022); “The Gift of Touch,” Orion, (Spring 2021); “Pain Pollen: The Twisted Ethnobotanical Roots of Cotton, Black Haw and Ground Hemlock,” JAHG (2021); “Sharing the Knowledge of Caulophyllum thalictroides (blue cohosh): Ethnobotany, Race and Women’s Reproductive Health in American History,” JHG 18, no 1 (Spring 2020); “Watering the Gardens of the Grandmother of Plants,” TEA Blog, (Summer 2020); “Researching ethnobotany in the archives: Authority and silences in the stories of Native and African American medicines,” Herbal History Research Network Blog, (2021). You can contact her at fordcj@potsdam.edu.

Samuel Frederick is an Associate Professor of German at Penn State. He is the author of Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter, as well as articles on various aspects of German-language literature and film from the eighteenth century to the present. He is also the co-editor (with Valerie Heffernan) of Robert Walser: A Companion, and the co-translator (with Graham Foust) of three volumes of Ernst Meister’s late poetry. His current project on collecting includes a chapter on nineteenth-century botanists and amateur plant collectors, central to which is an analysis of moss and its role in a late story by Stifter (also published separately, see secondary sources). You can contact him at smf35@psu.edu.

G

Ann Garascia teaches in the English Department at California State University, San Bernardino. She earned her Ph.D. in English Literature at University of California, Riverside. Her research lies at the intersection of nineteenth-century British literary, visual, and material cultures, archival studies, feminist studies, and ecocriticism. She is currently working on a monograph, tentatively titled Strange Flora, that braids together material turns in ecocriticism, feminist philosophy, and book history to shed light on connections between Victorian women’s botanical archiving and debates in contemporary biodiversity informatics. In support of this project, Ann is a 2020 Researcher-in-Residence at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. Her published work on botany and archives appears in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Literature and Culture, and the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Woman Writers. You can contact her at ann.garascia@csusb.edu.

Sophie Gerber is a French plant population geneticist and she worked specifically on kinship studies, both with theoretical approaches and their application to forest trees. She is currently working on bringing together plant biology with the humanities, especially with the philosophy of biology. She has published a work on plant individuality, coining the term of herbiary, the plant bestiary. Her subjects of study are plants, especially trees, and she is interested in analyzing the important role they play in the biological sciences and more precisely the relationships we build with them. You can contact her at sophie.gerber@u-bordeaux.fr.

Tina Gianquitto is an Associate Professor of Literature at the Colorado School of Mines, where she teaches courses in literature and the environment, American literature, literature and the history of nineteenth-century science, especially the emergence of evolutionary thought and Darwinism. She is currently writing a book that examines the influence Darwin’s plant studies had on galvanizing responses to evolutionary theory in the U.S. in the late 19th century. She has written on women, nature and science, as well as on Darwinian botany, and, in a different vein, Jack London. You can contact her at tinagian@mines.edu.

Prudence Gibson is author of the Critical Plant Studies series book The Plant Contract (Brill Rudopi 2018) and Lead Investigator of a major environmental aesthetics grant project (2020-23), in partnership with the Sydney Botanic Gardens Herbarium. She is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of North South Wales, Sydney. Her particular field of study interrogates the crossover of plant life and art/narrative and how this energetic interaction can improve human perception of vegetal life. She is author of several other monographs such as The Rapture of Death (2010) and Janet Laurence: The Pharmacy of Plants (New South Publishing 2015). She co-edited Aesthetics After Finitude, (Re.press 2016) and Covert Plants (Punctum Books 2018). She has also published over 350 essays and articles for Art and Australia, The Conversation, Art Monthly, etc. and has written many essays for art catalogues. You can contact her at p.gibson@unsw.edu.au.

Daniel Gilfillan is Associate Professor of German Studies and a Senior Sustainability Scholar in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. He is the author of Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio (Minnesota, 2009), and has published widely on German/Austrian radio- and sound art. He is currently working on a book project titled Sound in the Anthropocene: Sustainability and the Art of Sound, which explores sound-based examples that imagine acoustic realms where human-centered listening becomes displaced, where human voice and human noise reside solely as players within a larger phenomenology or ecosystem of communication. You can contact him at dgilfil@asu.edu.

Christa Grewe-Volpp is a retired professor of American literature and culture at the University of Mannheim, Germany. Her research focuses on ecocriticism and ecofeminism, on new materialism and critical animal studies as well as plant studies. She is the author of a book on ecocritical and ecofeminist analyses of contemporary American writers, called “Natural Spaces Mapped by Human Minds”: Ökokritische und ökofeministische Analysen zeitgenössischer amerikanischer Romane (2004). She also edited and co-edited books and journals on ecocritical topics. You can contact her at chgrewe@mail.uni-mannheim.de.

Lykke Guanio-Uluru is Professor of Literature at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. Her research focus is on literature and ethics, with an emphasis on plant studies, ecocriticism, climate fiction, fantasy, and game studies. She is the author of Ethics and Form in Fantasy Literature: Tolkien, Rowling and Meyer (2015) published by Palgrave Macmillan, in which she discusses the narrative significance of trees to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. She is the co-editor of the anthology Ecocritical Perspectives on Children’s Texts and Cultures: Nordic Dialogues (2018), published by Palgrave Macmillan, UK, in which she discusses “Plant-human hybridity in the story world of Kubbe” (chapter 8) and the author of “Imagining Climate Change: The Representation of Plants in Three Nordic Climate Fictions for Young Adults” (2019), published by Children’s Literature in Education. Guanio-Uluru has recently co-edited (with Nina Goga) the series Ecocritical Perspectives on Nordic Children’s and Young Adult Literature (2019-2020) for the Nordic Journal of ChildLit Aesthetics. She is currently working on a research anthology (with Melanie Duckworth) on The Representation of Plants in Children’s And Young Adult Literature. You can reach her at hagl@hvl.no.

H

Kristan M. Hanson is a Plant Humanities Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington, DC. She earned her PhD in art history from the University of Kansas in 2020. Her current research examines late nineteenth-century paintings of Parisian women, ornamental plants, and urban spaces, with a particular focus on charting sites where gendered spatial practices intersected with horticultural labor and leisure. She explores the geospatial and gender-historical significance of the sites portrayed in such paintings by mapping their locations within specific regions, while also elucidating societal attitudes about and experiences of actual women who transported plants there. She is also interested in the use of digital humanities methods and tools to tell compelling narratives about art, plants, gender, mobility, colonialism, power, and transregional trade networks. You can contact her at kmhanson2020@gmail.com.

Eva Hayward is an Assistant Professor in Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson. She has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, University of New Mexico, Uppsala University (Sweden), Duke University, and University of Cincinnati. Her research focuses on the study of sensation. She has recently published articles in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Cultural Anthropology, Parallax, differences, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Women and Performance. You can contact her at evah@email.arizona.edu.

Gretchen E. Henderson is Associate Director for Research at the Harry Ransom Center and Senior Lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin. She is interested in archival and curatorial approaches to plants, natural and cultural histories. The author of four books, along with arts media and opera libretti, Gretchen was formerly the Annie Clark Tanner Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah, with recent writings in Ecotone, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Notre Dame Review, and co-authored articles in Nature Sustainability and Conservation Biology. She has taught widely, including Georgetown, University of Utah, and MIT, with an upcoming short course on “Writing the Landscape” at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, which published her chapbook on Where a Library Meets a Landscape. Her new book, Life in theTar Seeps: Overlooked Ecologies at Great Salt Lake and Beyond, is forthcoming from Trinity University Press. You can contact her at gretchen.henderson@utexas.edu.

Quentin Hiernaux is a Research Associate with the Fonds de la recherche scientifique-FNRS and professor of philosophy of science at the Université libre de Bruxelles. He is also a honorary research associate at Meise Botanic Garden. His research focuses on the history and philosophy of life sciences, with an emphasis on plant sciences (history of botany, philosophy of biology, philosophy of ecology). His work focuses on the problem of biological individuality and, more generally, on the status of plants in the history of philosophy, epistemology, and in environmental ethics. Quentin Hiernaux co-edited with Benoît Timmermans the volume Philosophie du végétal (Vrin 2018). He is also the author of From Plant Behavior to Plant Intelligence? (Quae 2020, Quae 2023 for the English translation), Textes-clés de philosophie du végétal: botanique, épistémologie, ontologie (Vrin 2021) and co-author with Corentin Tresnie of Andrea Cesalpino’s De plantis libri XVI (1583) and the Transformation of Medical Botany in the 16th century. Edition, Translation, and Commentary of Book I (De Gruyter 2023). You can contact him at quentin.hiernaux@ulb.be.

Terry Hodge is a Graduate Research Assistant in the Department of Horticulture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently working on tomato variety trials with the aim of identifying promising tomato varieties for organic farmers in the United States of America. His research is part of a larger project, the Seed to Kitchen Collaborative, which uses participatory research methods to identify promising vegetable varieties for farmers, chefs and consumers. Terry is also a part of the interdisciplinary project Herbaria 3.0, which gathers stories about the relationships between plants and people from around the world. He can be reached at thodge@wisc.edu.

Marybeth Holleman is author of The Heart of the Sound and Among Wolves, and co-editor of the poetry/essay anthology Crosscurrents North, among others. Pushcart-prize nominee and finalist for the Siskiyou Prize, she’s published in venues including Orion, Christian Science Monitor, Sierra, Literary Mama, ISLE/OUP, North American Review, AQR, zoomorphic, Minding Nature, The Guardian, The Future of Nature, and on NPR. Her poetry collection, tender gravity,  is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. She runs the multi-medium blog Art and Nature, for which she’s always seeking guest posts. She holds a B.A. in Environmental Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from UAA, where she taught Literature, Women’s Studies, and Creative Writing. She’s currently at work on two poetry-prose projects focused on communications with/among/through species, one a collection of animal/plant conversations based on her time in Costa Rica. The other arises from her artist residency at Ninfa Gardens, 20 acres set among the ruins of a Nyphaeum and an ancient Roman village along the Appian Way where plants from all over the world thrive in a unique microclimate. Raised in North Carolina’s Smokies, Marybeth  transplanted to Alaska’s Chugach Mountains after falling head over heels for Prince William Sound just two years before the EVOS oil spill. You can contact her at marybeth@marybethholleman.com.

Rachel Holmes is a PhD candidate in receipt of a TECHNE AHRC studentship in support of her research project “The Language of Birds” at Kingston School of Art, which draws from ethnobotanist Dale Pendell and anthropologist Eduardo Kohn to develop a methodology to represent beyond-human communication, in the mythopoetic tradition. She is interested in applying this to a semiotic construction of human and non-human relations, gauged in the “language of birds” – chance, fortune and pre-linguistic modes of communication, including dream. Her project conceptualizes the body as the site of dreaming, and drawing from Georges Bataille characterizes the “lacerated body” as ritualistically cultured. Her chapter “The Crow: Nameless Ones of the Dream Zone” has recently been published in Acéphale and Autobiographical Philosophy in the 21st Century: Responses to the “Nietzsche event” (2021) and her first anthology of short stories The Butterfly Dream (2021) was published by Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers Press. You can contact her at rachel.holmes89@gmail.com.

Tove Holmes is Assistant Professor of German Studies at McGill University. She earned her PhD at Johns Hopkins University. She also taught at The University of Colorado Boulder and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. Her research areas include German literature and thought from the eighteenth century to the present, visual studies, history of science, literary theory, and environmental humanities. Ongoing projects include a book manuscript on literary images in German Realism as well as a study of literary strategies of depicting exotic plant and animal life in Alexander von Humboldt’s travelogues. You can contact her at tove.holmes@mcgill.ca.

Elizabeth Hyde is Associate Professor and Assistant Chair in the Department of History at Kean University where she teaches courses in European, cultural, and women’s history and serves as co-coordinator of the Department of History Honors Program. Hyde received her Ph.D. in history from Harvard University. Her first book, Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture, and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV (2005) explores the collection, cultivation, and political importance of flowers in early modern France, and was the recipient of the 2007 Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Award. She also edited and contributed to A Cultural History of Gardens in the Renaissance, 1400-1650 (2013). She is currently writing Of Monarchical Climates and Republican Soil: Nature, Nation, and Botanical Diplomacy in the Franco-American Atlantic World, a book that explores the mission of French botanist André Michaux, who was sent in 1785 by Louis XVI to study and collect North American trees. You can contact her at ehyde@kean.edu.

I

J

Joela Jacobs is Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona and the founder of this network. She earned her Ph.D. in Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on 19th-21st century German literature and film, Animal Studies, Environmental Humanities, Jewish Studies, the History of Sexuality, and the History of Science. She is currently working on a monograph, entitled Animal, Vegetal, Marginal: Being (Non)Human in German Modernist Grotesques, in which plants are agents in the creation and disruption of human identity (re)production. Her research in literary and cultural plant studies engages primarily with phytopoetics, vegetal eroticism, and vegetal violence. You can contact her at joelajacobs@arizona.edu.

Suryatapa Ghosh Jha is a cell biologist and plant humanist. She has a PhD in Plant Biology from the University of Vermont. She did her postdoctoral research at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University.  She currently is a Visiting Assistant Professor of biology at the Claremont Colleges in Southern California. Her research interests center on the evolutionary cell biology of how plants tolerate extreme environmental stressors and the effects of human exploration on plant nativity and biodiversity. Her current research addresses the role of lineage specific genes in plants’ adaptation to extreme environments and the introduction and stability of mustards as a non-native species in California. You can contact her at SJha@kecksci.claremont.edu.

K

Megan Kaminski is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kansas and Co-Director of the KU Global Grasslands CoLABorative. She specializes in poetry and poetics, queer ecology, plant studies, somatics, and the environmental humanities—and is the author of three books of poetry, Gentlewomen (2020), Deep City (2015) and Desiring Map (2012). Her work is informed by interdisciplinary research in social welfare, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, as well as previous work in the healing arts and at non-profit environmental organizations. Her public-facing work, in the form of the prairie divination deck (w/ L. Ann Wheeler) and the Ad Astra Project, focuses on helping people connect to their own ecosystems as a source of knowledge and inspiration for strategies to live in their world, to grieve and heal after loss, and to re-align their thinking towards kinship, community, and sustainability. You can contact her at kaminski@ku.edu.

Christine Kanz is Professor for modern German literature in the Austrian university network Cluster Mitte in Linz and Salzburg and is Visiting Professor at the University of Ghent in Belgium. Before, she taught and did research in Germany, Switzerland, the US, and South Africa and was a temporary Professor for literature at the University of Ghent in 2010-2015. Her research interests include emotional science, gender/diversity theory, recognition studies, and ecocritical approaches. Her recent publications focus on the reinvention of “nature” in Thomas Hettche’s novel Pfaueninsel (2018), ecocritical tendencies between Nature Writing and Geländetext (2020), literary discourses on plants in the age of the Anthropocene (2021), and Kritisches Naturschreiben (2021). You can contact her at christine.kanz@ph-ooe.at.

Artist Jenn Karson uses scientific processes and technologies as creative catalysts. Her art practice weaves tactile techniques with generative algorithms, transmuting digital data into architectural forms and visual languages. These artifacts, with their porous boundaries, challenge conventional divides between the artificial and the natural, creating a space where technology and nature converge. Through her Plant Machine Design Group, she advocates for Phytomechatronics: a speculative framework for technology attentive to the vital futures of plant, animal, and human soft bodies.

Dawn Keetley is Professor of English, teaching horror/gothic literature, film, and television at Lehigh University in Bethlehem PA. She has most recently published in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, the Journal of Popular Television, the Journal of Film and Video, andGothic Studies. She is the editor of We’re All Infected: Essays on AMC’s The Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human (McFarland, 2014) and the co-editor of a second collection, “There’s Us and the Dead”: Identity Politics in The Walking Dead, also forthcoming from McFarland. She is the co-editor (with Angela Tenga) of Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (Palgrave, 2016) and (with Matthew Wynn Sivils) of The Ecogothic in Nineteenth-century American Literature (Routledge, 2017). Her monograph, Making a Monster: Jesse Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s Boston, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2017. Keetley is working on essays on ecogothic and ecohorror, a monograph on post-Recession horror, and a collection of essays on Jordan Peele’s Get Out. She writes regularly for a horror website she co-created, www.HorrorHomeroom.com. You can contact her at dek7@lehigh.edu.

Sabiha Khan is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Texas-El Paso, focusing on documentary media and digital media production. She studies the rhetoric around the “future of food” particularly in agro-eco documentary feature films. She’s developing a documentary project called “Remembering How to Eat,” which looks at the way in which ancestral foodways can shape future imaginings of food. She’s also interested in the digital humanities and developing creative approaches to archiving cultural assets such as recipes and plant lore. You can contact her at skhan2@utep.edu.

Anke Kramer is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Research Center for Cultural Ecology, Literature and its Teaching Methodology at Siegen University. She earned her PhD with a thesis on water in 19th century literature at the University of Vienna, and she  is currently working on a project on climate in literature. She co-organized the workshop “Pflanzen und Gärten: Botanische Poetologien vom Mittelalter bis heute” in 2019. Her publications include articles on the elements and on nature spirits in literature and Album (2013, ed. together with Annegret Pelz). An edited volume (together with Urte Stobbe and Berbeli Wanning) on plants in modern literature and culture is forthcoming. You can contact her at anke.kramer@uni-siegen.de.

Isabel Kranz is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria, and she is a co-founder of this network. Her upcoming monograph focuses on the interrelations between the humanities and the sciences by analyzing different “languages of flowers.” Isabel’s publications includ Sprechende Blumen: Ein ABC der Pflanzensprache (Berlin 2014) and Floriographie: Die Sprachen der Blumen, ed. by Isabel Kranz, Alexander Schwan and Eike Wittrock (Munich 2016), as well as „The Language of Flowers in Popular Culture and Botany“ (2017). You can contact her at isabel.kranz@uni-ak.ac.at. 

L

Lauren LaFauci is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities in the Department of Thematic Studies at Linköping University in Sweden, where she also directs the “Multispecies Stories” research area of the Seed Box Environmental Humanities Collaboratory. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Michigan, specializing in the history, literature, and culture of the United States from the beginnings to 1900. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the related histories of racial formation and environment in the pre-Civil War United States, including two chapters on plants. Lauren currently serves as the professional liaison to the Society of Early Americanists (SEA) and as an international liaison for ASLE, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. She is part of the interdisciplinary team behind the new citizen humanities website, Herbaria 3.0, which shares stories about plants, people, and places. You can reach her at lauren.e.lafauci@liu.se.

Heather Lamb is a PhD Candidate in Literature & Culture at Illinois State University. Her research involves plant agency, liminality, movement, and textiles. Her dissertation explores plants as narratological thresholds or mechanisms for socio-political and socio-economic change. She is interested in the transformative nature of plants transfixed by the Anthropocene. She also pursues work regarding Medieval representations of hallucnogenic plants in herbaria. She is currently trying to initiate a digitization project for ISU’s in-house herbarium.  You can reach her at hlamb@ilstu.edu.

Fröydi Laszlo is a visual artist living in Gothenburg. She holds an MFA from Konstfackskolan in Stockholm (environmental arts), a Masters from The Valand Academy, Gothenburg University (the Histories of Photography), and has read art theory and philosophy at advanced level. She is the editor of artist-run 284 Publishing, which specializes in visual art, post- and non-human theory. Since 2016, she has been investigating how human relations to plants are colored by anthropomorphic projections. In areas of friction with plants, they tend to be described as animals (plant pets or plant monsters). This is  the case for the two plants she has focused on, the fresh water algae Aegagrophila linnaei (or Marimo) and Fallopia japonica (Japanese Knotweed or Itadori). Her research combines theoretical writing, photography, and performance. She is currently part of a transdisciplinary group that explores the world of the Vampire Squid (based on Vilém Flusser´s scientific fable “Vampyrotheutes Infernalis”), which will collaborate to produce a theater play, visual art, and performances. You can contact her at angoraart@hotmail.com.

Anna Lawrence is a postgraduate student in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge. Her research investigates plant-thinking in Victorian Britain through archival work on pamphlet and periodical literature to assess how nineteenth-century plant-thought may inform contemporary human/plant interactions. She is especially interested in everyday practices of floriculture and how they were mobilised – as a ‘botanical biopolitics’ – to moralise and regulate women, children, and the working classes, as well as considering multispecies methodologies that allow for the centring of the (historical) flower as a research subject in its own right. You can contact her at aml75@cam.ac.uk.

M

Eva Mangieri is a researcher in the fields of American and other literature at the University of Wuppertal, where she studied English, German, as well as English and German Literary Studies. After having finished her M.A. with a thesis on “Entangled Temporalities: Tense and Time(-Space) in Michael Christie’s Greenwood,” she is currently working on her PhD project “Toward Litreeture: Encountering Trees in the 21st-Century Novel.” Within the context of these projects and based on the findings of the More-than-Human Workgroup of the University of Wuppertal, she argues that “Litreeture” not only establishes new and noteworthy narrative aesthetics but also negotiates and questions anthropocentric concepts. Her research interests are centered around the intersections of narratology, the more-than-human turn, critical plant studies, and ecocriticism. Furthermore, she is interested in fictional world building in Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can contact her at mangieri@uni-wuppertal.de.

Theo Mantion is a PhD Student in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA). They are interested in questions of materiality in literature, queer and ecological thought, interspecific relationships, and their current area of research is 20th- and 21st-century French literature. They earned their MA from the Sorbonne (Paris) where they defended a thesis titled “Ecologies of the After: Worlding in the Wake of Catastrophe.” Their presentation and translation of Sin Wai Kin’s (fka Victoria Sin) short, interspecific story “The Strangler” was published as “L’Étrangleur” in the May 2021 issue of La Nouvelle Revue Française. Their essay “Queering the Orange: Burgess, Warhol, Bowie” will appear in the forthcoming volume A Clockwork Orange and Beyond (Manchester University Press). You can contact them at tmantion@g.harvard.edu.

Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Vitoria-Gasteiz. His work spans the fields of phenomenology, environmental philosophy, and political thought. In the area of critical plant studies, he has published multiple books and articles, such as Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (2014), The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness (2016), Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (2016, with Luce Irigaray), and Grafts: Writings on Plants (2016). He is the editor of the Brill|Rodopi book series “Critical Plant Studies” and maintains the Los Angeles Review of Books blog “The Philosopher’s Plant.” You can contact him at michael.marder@gmail.com.

Susan McHugh, Professor of English at the University of New England, has authored articles on how plants are represented as genetically modified crops and household ornaments in fiction. While firmly rooted in literary animal studies, her monographs to date — Dog (2004), Animal Stories (2011), and Love in a Time of Slaughters (forthcoming) — make the case that human intimacies with nonhumans anchor stories that profoundly challenge the terms of anthropocentrist thought. Her ongoing research focuses on the intersections of biological and cultural extinction. You can contact her at smchugh@une.edu.

Natania Meeker is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. With Antónia Szabari, she is the author of Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction (Fordham University Press, 2019) and a series of articles on topics ranging from plant horror to eighteenth-century botanical illustrator Madeleine Françoise Basseporte. She is also author of Voluptuous Philosophy: Literary Materialism in the French Enlightenment (Fordham 2006) and is currently at work on a monograph on feminine materialisms. Her interests include speculative plant fiction and art, feminist theory and thought, eighteenth-century philosophy and literature, and ecocritique. You can contact her at nmeeker@usc.edu.

Lucas Mertehikian is a postdoctoral fellow in Plant Humanities at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC. He earned his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University in 2022. Lucas is interested in the relationship between natural history collections, especially herbaria and botanical gardens, literature, and art, and the intersection of postcolonial and environmental studies in Latin America. He is also interested in how experimental scholarship, such as Digital Humanities tools, curatorial practice, and creative writing, can help tell engaging stories about plants, mobility, and extinction. His first book project Fake Originals: Collecting Latin America examines the circulation of Latin American objects in US-based collections and their relation with literature, including botanical collections. He is currently one of the editors of the Plant Humanities Lab (Dumbarton Oaks/JSTOR), a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary repository that publishes visual narratives on the cultural histories of plants. You can contact him at lemertehikian@g.harvard.edu.

Frederike Middelhoff is a literary scholar of German and English by training. Since March 2020 she is Assistant Professor of German Literature with a special focus on Romanticism at Goethe University in Frankfurt. Her first book (Metzler Verlag, 2020) explores the genre of animal autobiography between the late 18th and early 20th century from the perspective of a poetics of knowledge. Her new project explores the theoretical, artistic, and scientific contexts in which the Romantics discussed and depicted various forms, experiences, and consequences of migration (including more-than-human migrations). The study aims to reconstruct knowledges about migration in Romantic circles from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. Frederike specializes in 19th-century literature and culture and is interested in animal and plant studies, ecocritical theory, mobility and migration studies, and in the question of how literature and knowledge interplay more generally. Together with Sebastian Schönbeck, Roland Borgards, and Catrin Gersdorf, she has co-edited the collected volume Texts, Animals, Environments: Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics (2019). You can contact her at middelhoff@em.uni-frankfurt.de.

M. Bettina Mielke studied pharmaceutical biology and public health at the universities of Bonn and Düsseldorf. She received her PhD with a thesis on health systems research. Furthermore, she completed a BA degree at the Faculty of Philosophy in Cologne in Oriental Studies. She works as a scientific writer with the main fields of interest: Public Health Nutrition, Botany and Plant Constituents, and Diversity of Cultures and Societies. You can reach her at publicnutrition@web.de.

Annemarie Mönch is a PhD student in English Literature at the University of Erfurt, Germany. In her doctoral project, she focuses on queer and queering nature writing(s) in the horror and gothic literature of the late Victorian and Edwardian period. She is interested in how the so-called non-human (trees and forests in particular) emerges within the narratives – articulated by sounds and smells – as a story-making agent.

Erin A. Myers is a naturalist, gardener, French instructor and scholar of the long French Enlightenment. She holds a Ph.D. in French Literature from Indiana University (October 2018). She studies early biology, the Ideologues, and the French novel, with a particular focus on Lamarck’s definition of the human. Her paper, “Familiar Plants and Critical Distance in Lamarck’s 1783 ‘Botanique,’” was part of the seminar session “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Thinking with the Non-Human in Old Regime French Literature” which she co-chaired at the Northeast Modern Language Association’s March 2019 convention in Washington, D.C. Her current projects include an article on science and the novel in France, 1800-1830. You can contact her at erin.a.myers@gmail.com.

Natasha Myers is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University, the convenor of the Politics of Evidence Working Group, director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory, co-organizer of Toronto’s Technoscience Salon and co-founder of the Write2Know Project. Her book Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke UP, 2015) won the 2016 Robert K. Merton Prize from the American Sociological Association’s Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section. It is an ethnography of an interdisciplinary group of scientists who make living substance come to matter at the molecular scale. Her current projects span investigations of plant-people conspiracies in a range of contexts, including studies on the arts and sciences of vegetal sensing and sentience, the politics and aesthetics of garden enclosures in a time of climate change, and most recently, she has launched a long-term ethnography on restoration ecology and enduring colonial violence in Toronto’s High Park oak savannahs. There she is also experimenting with the arts of ecological attention through a research-creation project with award winning filmmaker and dancer Ayelen Liberona. Becoming Sensor engages art and anthropology to design protocols for an “ungrid-able ecology” grounded in decolonial feminist praxis. Links to her various projects, publications, actions, and events can be found at http://natashamyers.org and you can contact her at nmyers@yorku.ca.

N

Vin Nardizzi is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. His research areas are environmental literary history and Renaissance literature. He published Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (University of Toronto Press 2013; paperback 2018). Forthcoming publications include a collection of essays, co-edited with Tiffany Jo Werth for the University of Toronto Press, about how contemporary environmental matters have shaped the ways that scholars of Middle English and Renaissance literatures conduct their research and teach courses; and, with Robert W. Barrett, Jr., a special issue of the journal postmedieval called “Premodern Plants.” His current book-length project, “Marvellous Vegetables in Renaissance Poetry,” explores wondrous representations of plant life in Renaissance poetry, especially (though not exclusively) in the verse of the seventeenth-century English poet Andrew Marvell. Here, vegetable is an umbrella term for all forms of plant life, but the book’s more specific objects of study are leeks, laurel trees, tulips, mandrakes, potatoes, and tobacco. Something of a poetic natural history, “Marvellous Vegetables” leverages seventeenth-century vegetable figures to articulate fundamentally new questions about the surprising array of vegetable capacities, deprivations, desires, essences, histories, and materialities that shaped ideas about humanness in Renaissance poetry and the visual arts. He is also a founding member of the research collective called “Oecologies: Inhabiting Premodern Worlds.” You can contact him at nardizzi@mail.ubc.ca.

Solvejg Nitzke is interim professor for comparative literature at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. She has co-edited the Green Letters special issue Arboreal Imaginaries (2021, with Helga Braunbeck) and the collection Baum & Text (2020, with Stephanie Heimgartner & Simone Sauer-Kretscher). Her monograph Making Kin with Trees. A Cultural Poetics of Interspecies Care will be published with Palgrave in 2025. She has studied and taught in Bochum, Charlottesville, Vienna and at TU Dresden and published on catastrophes, myth, the whole earth, detective & science fiction, climate, forests, idylls, monster plants and literary and cultural theories of human-nature relationships. Her research follows the questions of how knowledge is produced under precarious circumstances, what role narrative plays in dis/connecting humans and nonhumans, and how material consequences of stories (and vice versa) might be conceptualized. She makes a point of taking research out of the University and talks about trees and texts wherever she gets the chance. Her portrait of ferns (in German) will be published with Matthes & Seitz in October 2024. You can contact her at Solvejg.Nitzke@ruhr-uni-bochum.de.

O

Laura Ouillon is a PhD Candidate in British Visual Culture at the University of Paris, France. Her PhD focuses on the imaginary of trees and forests in contemporary British art from the 1980s onwards. Her aim is to see how the contradictions of British contemporary identities and identifications have been – and are – negotiated and articulated in these canonical artistic motifs. You can contact her at laura.ouillon@outlook.com.

Magdalena Ożarska is Associate Professor at the Department of Modern Languages, Jan Kochanowski University, Poland. She is the author of Meanderings of the English Enlightenment: The Literary Oeuvre of Christopher Smart (2008), Lacework or Mirror? Diary Poetics of Frances Burney, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley (2013) and Two Women Writers and their Italian Tours: Mary Shelley’s “Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843” and Łucja Rautenstrauchowa’s “In and Beyond the Alps” (2014). Her current research interests include 18th- and 19th-century English and Polish self writing, travel writing, HAS, critical plant studies and food studies – areas which she plans to explore in her next monograph. You can contact her at mozarska@gmail.com.

P

Giulia Pacini is Associate Professor of French & Francophone Studies at The College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research investigates the political and material significance of trees in early modern France, with a particular focus on the discourses that surrounded the acts of planting, pruning, felling, transplanting, and grafting. She is the co-editor (with Laura Auricchio and Elizabeth H. Cook) of an interdisciplinary volume entitled Invaluable Trees: Cultures of Nature, 1660-1830 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2012). She has also published essays on: the French revolutionary liberty trees; early modern French environmental concerns; the use of arboreal metaphors in royal propaganda; human-arboreal interactivity in the late eighteenth century; and contemporary adaptations of eighteenth-century arboreal narratives. Her current work examines metaphors of sap in French revolutionary discourse. You can contact her at gxpaci@wm.edu.

Elizabeth Parker is the author of the monograph The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination, published with Palgrave Gothic in March 2020. She is the founding editor of the journal Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic and television editor for The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies. She has co-edited print collections including Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). She has co-organized several conferences on space, place, and the relationship between the Gothic and the nonhuman and has published her work in various titles such as Plant Horror! Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (Palgrave, 2016) and The Palgrave Companion to Horror Literature (Palgrave, 2018). She has taught English Literature and courses on Popular Culture at a number of universities across the UK and Ireland and currently works at St Mary’s University Twickenham. Passionate about all things ecoGothic, she is keen to develop an ecohorror/ecoGothic research hub in the UK and is very open to collaborative opportunities. She can be reached at gothicnaturejournal@gmail.com.

Jon Pitt is Assistant Professor of Japanese Environmental Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. His current book project, titled Becoming Botanical: Entanglements of Plant Life and Human Subjectivity in Modern Japan, proposes that vegetation (and the scientific study of plants) offered a number of modern Japanese writers and filmmakers a new model through which to rethink human subjectivity and develop notions of plasticity in response to turbulent historical events. He is also currently working on a translation of Itō Hiromi’s essay collection Tree Spirits Grass Spirits. He can be contacted at jpitt@uci.edu.

Stephanie Posthumus is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, Cultures at the University of McGill. Her areas of expertise are French ecocriticism (see her monograph French Écocritique: Reading Contemporary French Theory and Literature Ecologically (2017)), French animal studies (see French Thinking about Animals co-edited essay collection with Louisa Mackenzie (2015)), and Digital Environmental Humanities (see dig-eh.org). She is currently working on a new research project on the circulation of plants in contemporary French and Francophone literatures (see imaginairebotanique.ca). You can contact her at stephanie.posthumus@mcgill.ca.

Nikita Prokhorov is a PhD Student in Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. Her research centers around applied epistemology within ecological and vegetal contexts. Through a Wittgensteinian exploration of doubt, certainty, and foundational knowledge commitments, she aims to articulate an epistemological system that facilitates notions of non-human reasoning with special focus on vegetal life. Her research draws heavily on Alfred North Whitehead’s ontology of process philosophy by dramatically expanding animacy, creativity, and personality, which serves as the foundation for her epistemological claims. Additionally, she has research interests in the intersection of transgender queer studies and critical plant studies, as they both relate to growth, flourishing, and becoming. She can be contacted at nprokhor@uci.edu.

Laura Pustarfi is an independent scholar and writer focusing on trees in the Western philosophical tradition. She completed her doctoral work in Philosophy and Religion with a focus on Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies in 2019. Her dissertation, Arboreality: Revisioning Trees in the Western Paradigm, examines trees and plants in Western thought with particular focus on philosophical literature in order to explore an arboreal and vegetal ontology and ethics that respects plants themselves. Her interests include integral ecology, environmental philosophy, especially eco-phenomenology, and religion and ecology. You can contact her at lpustarfi@mymail.ciis.edu.

Q

Leo El Qawas is a PhD candidate at the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. Her thesis – “Poetic Plantwork Practices: Radical Herbalist Relationships with Plants” – is due to be published at the end of 2021. It explores the practices used by herbalists to cultivate working relationships with plants as teachers and co-participants, using a poetic framework to affirm these relationships within (and in challenge to) a Euro-Western knowledge schema. She holds a Masters degree in Theory and Criticism from the University of Western Ontario. She is a lay herbalist and forager. You can contact her at eloquista@gmail.com.

R

Animesh Roy is currently teaching as an Assistant Professor in English at St. Xavier’s College, Simdega, India. Before that he has taught at other universities in India such as The University of Burdwan, Kazi Nazrul University and Netaji Subhas Open University. He specializes in the area of Environmental Humanities. His research interests are Literature and Environment, Plant Studies, Energy Humanities, Literature and the Anthropocene and the North-South discourse.  You can contact him at roy.english82@gmail.com.

Marc Ricard is a PhD Candidate in the department of English at the University of Exeter (UK). His current research project, tentatively titled Fantastical Flora: Vegetal Imaginaries in Late Victorian Literature, investigates accounts of imagined plants or “cryptobotany” in Victorian literature and culture, with a special focus on speculative fiction, plant breeding, and the role of the ecogothic in evolutionary theory. You can contact him at mxr201@exeter.ac.uk or on twitter @marcxricar.

Sergej Rickenbacher is a Postdoctoral Scholar in German Studies and Literary Theory at the RWTH Aachen University. He received his PhD from the University of Lausanne and held appointments at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf and the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. His research focuses on European Literature, History of Knowledge and Science, Environmental Humanities, and German Media Studies. His ongoing research project is entitled: Riechende Texte: Eine Mediologie der Olfaktion in der deutschen und französischen Literatur (1750-2010), in which plants are sources, figurations, and metaphors for a literary language of olfaction and constitute concepts of humankind. You can contact him at s.rickenbacher@germlit.rwth-aachen.de.

John Charles Ryan is a poet and scholar with appointments as Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New England, Australia, and Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Australia. His teaching and research cross between the environmental and digital humanities. He is the author or editor of the books Digital Arts (Bloomsbury, 2014, co-author), The Language of Plants (University of Minnesota, 2017, co-editor), Plants in Contemporary Poetry (Routledge, 2017, author), Southeast Asian Ecocriticism (Lexington, 2017, editor), Forest Family (Brill, 2018, co-editor) and Australian Wetland Cultures (Lexington, forthcoming). His current projects include experimental phytopoetics, botanical cognition and human-plant collaboration. You can contact him at jryan63@une.edu.au.

S

Hanna Samola works as a Senior Lecturer in Finnish literature at Tampere University. Her doctoral dissertation (2016) discusses fairy tale intertexts and motifs in contemporary Finnish dystopian fiction. In her research, she has focused on genre studies, intertextual and intermedial studies, critical plant studies and fairy tale studies. She is specially interested in depictions of plants in dystopian fiction and in fairy tales. Samola is currently writing a book on fairy tale intertextuality in contemporary Finnish literature. You can reach her athanna.samola@tuni.fi.

Dawn Sanders is an Associate Professor of Biology Didactics in the Department of Pedagogical, Curricular, and Professional Studies in Gothenburg University in Sweden, where she also directs the Beyond Plant Blindness research project funded by The Swedish Research Council. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Sussex, UK, specializing in botanic gardens as environments for learning. Dawn is currently editing a special edition of the interdisciplinary journal Plants, People, Planet on “plant blindness,” which will be published early 2019. She is a member of the founding team behind the new citizen humanities website, Herbaria 3.0, which collects stories about the intertwined relationships between plants and people. You can reach her at dawn.sanders@gu.se.

Caroline Schaumann is Associate Professor of German Studies at Emory University and affiliated faculty with Jewish Studies and Film Studies. She is the author of Memory Matters: Generational Responses to Germany’s Nazi Past in Recent Women’s Literature (De Gruyter, 2008), and established her presence in the growing field of ecocriticism with research articles on Alexander von Humboldt, mountain films, and hybrid environments in the Anthropocene. She co-edited the anthology Heights of Reflection with Sean Ireton (Camden House, 2012, paperback edition in 2017), a special volume of Colloquia Germanica on “Dirty Nature” with Heather Sullivan (2014), and more recently, German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene with Heather Sullivan (Palgrave, 2017). This anthology gathers essays on both canonical and non-canonical German-language texts and films in order to provide, on the one hand, ecocritical models for German Studies, and, on the other, an introduction to environmental issues in German literature and film for a broader audience. You can contact her at cschaum@emory.edu.

Oriana Schwartzentruber is a PhD Candidate in the department of Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. She also holds previous degrees in Social Work and Fine Art. Her dissertation work focuses on colonial botany and the genderized history of plant use and production in North America as a way to identify and critique, in broader terms, the moral uses to which the concept of ‘nature’ has been put historically. Her other work focuses on queer ecology, rural sexualities, ecocriticism and the rural gaze. You can contact her at orianas@yorku.ca.

Merlin Seller is a Lecturer in Design and Screen Cultures at the University of Edinburgh. They completed their undergrad and masters at St Andrews and Oxford, respectively, obtaining their doctoral thesis at the University of East Anglia concerning visual and tactile materialities in intermedium works between film, photography, and painting. With a background in Art History, they now work across Film, Media and Game Studies with research interests in (Post)Phenomenology, Plant Horror, and the Non-human. Forthcoming publications include: “Ever-Lockdown: Waiting through Times of Playbour and Pandemic in Animal Crossing,” concerning weeding practices in games; “Ugly Death: Rotting with the More-than-human in The Last of Us Part II (2020),” concerning horror and lichens; and “Hiding (in) the Tall Grass: Rethinking Background Assets in Videogame Plantscapes” for an Ecogames conference and edited volume with the Utrecht Centre for Game Research. Their long-term work focuses on plant blindness and “backgrounds” in interactive media. You can contact them at merlin.seller@ed.ac.uk.

Harry Smith is a PhD candidate at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the University of Roehampton. Formerly a curator-botanist in the Kew herbarium, his collaborative research project focuses on the ‘Miscellaneous Reports’, a unique collection of letters, photographs and government communications that chronicles the development of economic botany and the network of colonial botanic gardens. With a specific focus on nineteenth-century Africa, his research examines the entanglement of indigenous and imperial knowledge through the lenses of botanical exploration and exploitation. He is particularly interested in the diversity of ways in which humans use, relate to and make sense of vegetal life, and how the concepts of nature and humanity are continually renegotiated through our relations with the nonhuman. You can contact him at harry.smith@kew.org.

Undine Stabrey is an Archaeologist and Philosopher of Science. She is currently writing Benutzeroberfläche des Seins und Form der Zeit, a book on the conditions and relations of digital temporalities and how their movements shape future ways of being in the world. She is also developing a book project called Salat und Sein, which describes the actual change in the perception of plants. Her teaching spans history, philosophy of reception and knowledge of Classics/Humanities as well as ancient history, egyptology, archaeology, and the areas of philosophy of education and educational science. She has taught at the Universities of Basel, Berne, at Paris I Sorbonne, and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Northwestern Switzerland. Her research explores time as a relationship between thinking and things. Other areas of inquiry are anthropocentric structures and post-scientific constellations, plants, petrification processes in history, and water. You can contact her at undine.stabrey@cgs.unibe.ch.

Kristine Steenbergh is Associate Professor in English Literature at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She specializes in the early modern period, the history of emotions, and ecocriticism. She is a board member of the Environmental Humanities Center (CLUE+) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, which she founded together with colleagues and students from different humanities disciplines in 2016. She is also a board member of the Benelux Association for the Study of Culture and Ecology (BASCE) and a member of the Dutch Young Royal Academy (De Jonge Akademie, KNAW). Her most recent publication is a volume edited with Katherine Ibbett, Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming April 2021), in which one of the chapters she contributed explores notions of compassion with non-human animals in the Anthropocene. She is currently writing on changing affective relations with plant life in the early modern period. You can contact her at k.steenbergh@vu.nl. 

Maria Stehle is Professor of German and Co-Chair of the Interdisciplinary Program in Cinema Studies at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Her publications include three monographs entitled Ghetto Voices in Contemporary German Cultures (2012), Awkward Politics: The Technologies of Popfeminist Activism (with Carrie Smith-Prei, 2016), and Precarious Intimacies: The Politics of Touch in Contemporary European Cinema (with Beverly Weber, 2020). She has also published various book chapters, and articles in the fields of German, Media, Film, and Gender Studies. Her new project entitled Plants and Place-Making: Interrelations in and Beyond German Literature, Film, and Art is funded by a grant from the Humanities Center at the University of Tennessee. You can contact her at mstehle@utk.edu.

Urte Stobbe is Associate Professor at the German Department at University of Vechta (Germany). She received her PhD at University of Goettingen (Germany) and is one of the editors of the first German-language introduction into “Ecocriticism” at Boehlau (2015). She also co-edited the book Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture at Lexington Books (2017). In November 2017 she organized a conference panel on “Human Plant Metamorphoses from the Perspective of Cultural Plant Studies” at annual conference of the Society of Cultural Studies (Kulturwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft) at the University of Ghent. An extended conference transcript is in preparation. You can contact her at urte.stobbe@uni-vechta.de.

Aubrey Streit Krug is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Ecosphere Studies at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. Her research focuses on stories of relationships between humans and plants in American U.S. and Indigenous literature, particularly through ethnobotanical and agricultural literature. She earned her PhD in English and Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is also a student of the Omaha language. Learn more and find contact info at her website, aubreystreitkrug.com.

Dani Stuchel is an interim educational support faculty librarian at Pima Community College and assistant curator for the Pittsburgh Queer History Project. Dani also helped set up this network. As an archivist, Dani researches knowledge production within seed banks and herbaria, and the impact of plant presence in the archives. You can contact Dani at danis@email.arizona.edu.

Heather I. Sullivan is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Trinity University. She is co-editor with Caroline Schaumann of German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene (2017); with John McCarthy, Nicholas Saul, and Stephanie Hilger of The Early History of Embodied Cognition from 1740-1920 (2016); and of special journal issues on ecocriticism in the New German Critique 2016; Colloquia Germanica (2014), and ISLE (2012). She has published extensively on Goethe, ecocriticism, and science and literature. She is also author of The Intercontextuality of Self and Nature in Ludwig Tieck’s Early Works. Her current mongraph projects are 1) “Goethe and Ecocriticism” in German studies; and 2) “The Dark Green: Plants in the Anthropocene,” a comparative study of international and North American literature. You can contact her at hsulliva@trinity.edu.

Carla Swiderski is a Ph.D. Candidate in German Studies and member of the doctoral school for Humanities at the University of Hamburg. Her dissertation project concentrates on the human-animal relation depicted in German literature and philosophy written in exile. She also focuses on the plant motive in exile literature, not least because one of the most used and discussed terms by the exiles to express the loss of their homeland is “Entwurzelung” (rootlessness). In addition, she is interested in the use of textual plants in theoretical and poetic reflections. You can contact her at carla.swiderski@studium.uni-hamburg.de.

T

Beatrice Trînca is a scholar of German literature as well as of the Study of Religion. She received her doctorate degree at the University of Würzburg with a thesis entitled Parrieren und undersnîden: Wolframs Poetik des Heterogenen (published in 2008). Since 2012, she has been Assistant Professor for Religion and Literature in Medieval European Culture and Its Reception, with a focus on Gender Studies at the Institute for the Study of Religion at the Freie Universtät Berlin. In 2017, she received her Habilitation in Medieval German Language and Literature at the Universität Hamburg with Amor conspirator: Zur Ästhetik des Verborgenen in der höfischen Literatur. Beatrice Trînca is co-editor of the volume Spiritual Vegetation: Vegetal Nature in Religious Contexts Across Medieval and Early Modern Europe (forthcoming in fall 2019). You can contact her at beatrice.trinca@fu-berlin.de.

Dan Torre is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Design at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is author of a number of books, including Cactus (Reaktion Books, 2017) and Carnivorous Plants (Reaktion Books, 2019). You can contact him at dan.torre@rmit.edu.au.

U

V

Douglas Vakoch is the general editor of the book series Critical Plant Studies, published by Lexington Books, as well as two other series that also include books in plant studies: Ecocritical Theory and Practice and Environment and Society. He has edited over twenty books himself, including Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI) (2011), Feminist Ecocriticism (2012), Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication (2014), Ecopsychology, Phenomenology, and the Environment (2014), The Drake Equation (2015), Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature (2020), Ecofeminist Science Fiction (2021), Transgender India (2022), and The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature (2022). Vakoch is President of METI International, a San Francisco-based research organization whose namesake activity is Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI)—sending powerful, intentional radio signals to nearby stars to elicit a response from possible technological civilizations. He is also Director of Green Psychotherapy, PC, a private practice that helps clients with eco-anxiety. His work has been featured in such publications as The New York Times, Nature, and Science. You can contact him at dvakoch@meti.org or dvakoch@ciis.edu.

Patrícia Vieira is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Comparative Literature, and Film and Media Studies at Georgetown University and Researcher at the Center for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra. Her fields of expertise are Literature and Philosophy, Literary Theory, Utopian Studies and Environmental Studies. Her most recent books are States of Grace: Utopia in Brazilian Culture (2018) and the co-edited The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature (2017). She is currently working on a book project on ecocritical approaches to Amazonian literature and cinema. You can contact her at pilmvieira@gmail.com.

W

Johannes Wankhammer is Assistant Professor of German at Princeton University, where he focuses on critical and aesthetic theory, the cultural history of attention, and the environmental humanities. His first book Creatures of Attention: Aesthetics and the Subject before Kant (Cornell UP, 2024) traces the discovery of attention as a mental faculty in the German eighteenth century and argues that early aesthetics emerged in part as a critique of the Enlightenment paradigm of strained attention; the book also addresses the ecological dimension of Alexander Baumgarten’s foundational aesthetics. Building on this work, his current book project undertakes a critical environmental history of German aesthetics. Johannes has authored several articles on the complexities and challenges involved in representing entanglements between human and more-than-human worlds, including an article on the ambivalent status of anthropomorphism in Peter Wohlleben’s Das Geheime Leben der Bäume (The Hidden Life of Trees), a forthcoming handbook article on metaphors of roots and rootedness in Western culture, and an essay on how Max Frisch’s experimental prose narrative Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (Man in the Holocene) addresses blind spots of classical narrative when it comes to representing the scale and dynamism of ecological and geological changes. You can contact him at jw54@princeton.edu.

Judith Elisabeth Weiss is an Art Historian and Cultural Anthropologist. She studied History of Art, Cultural Anthropology and Comparative Literature in Mainz and Tübingen. She earned her PhD on the subject of primitivism and modern art at the University Heidelberg. From 2011 to 2020, she was a researcher at the Leibniz Centre for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin, where she led a research project on pictorial models of plants. She is a lecturer at the Berlin University of the Arts and an editor and guest publisher of the art magazine Kunstforum International. Before moving to Berlin, she was a curator for modern and contemporary art at various museums and has organized many exhibitions. She has published numerous essays on contemporary art as well as on the cultural significance of plants, including the volumes Von Pflanzen und Menschen: Leben auf dem grünen Planeten (2019, with Kathrin Meyer) and Disziplinierung der Pflanzen: Bildvorlagen zwischen Ästhetik und Zweck (2020). You can contact her at judith.weiss@berlin.de.

Amanda White is a Toronto­-based visual artist and a PhD candidate in the interdisciplinary Cultural Studies program at Queen’s University (Canada) where her practice-led PhD project “Looking Plants in the Eye” was awarded a Joseph Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship (SSHRC). Her research interests include: human-plant relationships and imaginaries, interdisciplinary and collaborative art practices, art and the environment, posthumanities, environmental humanities, eco-criticism and science-fiction, issues in agriculture and food, urban ecologies and socially-engaged arts. Amanda holds an MFA and BFA in studio practice, her current work includes a number of recent plant-related publications, artworks, collectives, collaborations and inter-disciplinary projects. You can contact her at amanda.white@queensu.ca.

Steven F. White recently retired from teaching Latin American literature and film at St. Lawrence University. He is the co-creator of the website Microcosms: A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas, a project at the juncture of art, science and technology with an emphasis on traditional ethnobotanical knowledge and biocultural heritage. This teaching resource is available in English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish. A second edition of his co-edited work Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the Amazon’s Sacred Vine (Synergetic Press, 2016) won an Independent Publishers Book Award. His essay on Ceiba pentandra appears in The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence. He did an ecocritical study for Seven Trees Against the Dying Light by Nicaraguan poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra (Northwestern University Press, 2007) and translated the ethnobotanical poems of Esthela Calderón in The Bones of My Grandfather (Amargord, 2018). He edited El consumo de lo que somos: muestra de poesía ecológica hispánica contemporánea (Amargord, 2014) and served as guest editor of a special issue on ecology and Latin American literature of Review: Latin American Literature and the Arts (2012). He is the author of Bajo la palabra de las plantas, poesía selecta: 1979-2009 (400 Elefantes, 2009). You can contact him at stevenfwhite625@gmail.com.

X

Y

Anne Yoncha is currently Assistant Professor of Art + Painting Area Coordinator at Metropolitan State University Denver. She was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware. After earning her MFA at the University of Montana in 2019, she was awarded a Fulbright fellowship at the Natural Resources Institute Finland, working with restorationists to make collaborative art-science work about former peat extraction sites outside Oulu. Her practice combines digital sensing technology, such as bio-data sonification, and analog, traditional processes including painting with ink she makes from locally-sourced plant matter. Her ongoing research with the HAB (High Altitude Bioprospecting) working group began in Fall 2019 at Field_Notes, a residency of Finland’s Bio Art Society at Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in subarctic Lapland, where she worked with artists, biologists, and programmers to detect high-altitude microbes using a heli-kite. Outside the studio she can often be found doing another kind of environmental “research” via bicycle. You can contact her at ayoncha@gmail.com.

Z

Magdalena Zamorska holds a PhD in Cultural Studies (2012) and is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Cultural Studies at the University of Wroclaw in Poland. Her research interests include human and non-human movement, multispecies ethics, and critical plant studies. She has completed basic Instructor in Choreotherapy training (2010), published a study on butō dance in Poland Intense Bodily Presence: Practices of Polish Butō Dancers (2018), and was involved in the international collaborative project STELLA (Somatic Tech Live Lab). Recently she edited the volume of Prace Kulturoznawcze journal entitled Cultural Herbarium (2020). At the moment she is researching for her current project on plant-human ethics for arts. You can contact her at magdalena.zamorska2@uwr.edu.pl.

Nikoleta Zampaki is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Philology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece. She earned her PhD in Modern Greek Literature from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece. She was Instructor at the University of Utah in the USA. Her disciplines are the Environmental Humanities, Posthumanities, Digital Humanities, and Comparative Literature. She is Associate and Managing Editor at the scientific journal Ecokritike and current member of the Education Team of V.I.N.E. at Glenn Research Center of NASA. She is series editor of “Exeter Studies in Environmental Humanities. Past, Present and Future Econarratives” at University of Exeter Press and co-editor of the book series “Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures” at Rowman & Littlefield. You can contact her at nikzamp@phil.uoa.gr.

Back To Top