Plant humanities is an interdisciplinary field, formalized around 2018 through Dumbarton Oaks and JSTOR Labs, studying plants' significance to human culture using humanities methods—history, anthropology, art history, literature, philosophy—rather than natural science. It examines how plants shaped migration, trade, medicine, colonialism, and identity, overlapping with environmental and digital humanities via digitized herbaria and botanical archives.
Mateja Kurir talks to Michael Marder, a philosopher of plant life, about the place of plants in Western thought, vegetal time, Chernobyl, waste and fire, and what landscape architects might learn from treating the ground as active and the landscape as a collaborator.
Medina Novoa is interested in transatlantic narratives and the ecological and cultural co-production of landscapes. Her research follows a single tree species, Araucaria araucana, from its native forests in southern Chile and Argentina into the ornamental gardens of Georgian and Victorian Britain, unfolding the wider social, ecological, and cultural entanglements that shaped how nature was seen, classified, transplanted, and designed with.
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