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.
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.
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 has taught classes on “Green Germany” and “German Environmental Literature, Art and Film” for a while and has now also shifted her research interests to ecocriticism, has given presentations on literary plant studies, submitted book reviews and is working on her first article in this field. You can contact her at helga_braunbeck@ncsu.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.
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 a PhD candidate in Department of History at the University of Memphis. Her research areas are modern France and Germany, Romanticism, and garden/landscape studies. She holds Master’s degrees in Modern European History and French Language and Literature from the University of Memphis. Her dissertation, “Les jardins exotiques: Early French Romanticism and Its Impact on Travel Inspired Nineteenth-Century French Gardens,” focuses on flora exchange and botanophilia correspondences in the transatlantic during the Revolutionary Era (1750-1850). You can contact her at kclapper@memphis.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.
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 may contact her at sdigrego@olemiss.edu.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Christina Gerhardt is Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities, Film and German Studies at the University of Hawaii. She is the author of Nature in Adorno and editor of Climate Change, Hawaii and the Pacific. She has been awarded grants from the Fulbright Commission, the DAAD and the NEH. She has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, at the Free University Berlin and at Columbia University. Previously, she taught in the Department of German at the University of California at Berkeley. Her writing has been published in the journals Capitalism, Nature and Socialism, Cineaste, Film Criticism, Film Quarterly, German Studies Review, Mosaic, New German Critique, Quarterly Review of Film and Video and Wide Screen and in the edited volumes Critical Currents: Essays on Water in Contemporary Literature and Film; Water: An Atlas; and My Ocean Guide. You can contact her at cg2020@hawaii.edu.
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.
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.
Kristan M. Hanson is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at the University of Kansas. She holds an M.A. in art education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an M.A. in art history from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, "In Bloom: Women and Horticulture in French Visual Culture, 1860s-1880s," examines artistic engagements with the significant roles of gender, movement, and urbanism in Paris' ornamental plant trade. For the project, Kristan employs emergent digital tools to visualize Paris' horticultural network and the city's botanical entanglement with cultures, regions, and ecosystems within and outside of Europe. You can contact her at khanson1@ku.edu.
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.
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.
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.
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. Three of her recent articles engage in literary plants studies. You can contact her at joelajacobs@email.arizona.edu.
Vera Kaulbarsch is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Department of Comparative Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, where she also obtained her Ph.D. Her current research project, tentatively titled Flora Symbolica: Blumen, Botanik, Begehren, focuses on the encoding of the female body in poetical figurations of the flower and the flowery. She is specifically interested in the way flowers both veil and unveil the violent breaking of boundaries, which is revealed in the near obsessive connection of flowers to virginity, blood, skin and orifices in Western poetry. The project traces the development of this imagery and its intersection with the poetics of ‘flowery language’ in lyrical texts from the Renaissance to the early 20th Century. She is also part of the DFG-Netzwerk Berühren: Literarische, mediale und politische Figurationen. You can contact her at vera.kaulbarsch@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
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.
Isabel Kranz is a Postdoctoral Scholar in German Studies at the University of Vienna and she is a co-founder of this network. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Erfurt and held appointments at Erfurt and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. Her ongoing research project is entitled Literarische Botanik: Pflanzen als Wissensfiguren, 1700 bis 2000 and focuses on the interrelations between the humanities and the sciences by analyzing different “languages of flowers.” Isabel is a founding member of the working group Floriographie. Her publications include 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). You can contact her at isabel.kranz@univie.ac.at.
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.
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.
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.
Frederike Middelhoff is a literary scholar of German and English and a research assistant in the DFG-Humanities-Centre-for-Advanced-Studies Imaginarien der Kraft ('Imaginaries of Force') at the University of Hamburg, Germany. In February 2019, she completed her PhD at the University of Würzburg, Germany. The thesis explores the genre of animal autobiography between the late 18th and early 20th century from the perspective of a poetics of knowledge. The book is expected to be published in the winter 2019/2020. Her new project investigates the concept of a 'force of Nature' and aims to reconstruct the epistemological, aesthetic, and political trajectories of the forces attributed to and invested in 'Nature' from the early-modern period until the present. Frederike specializes in 19th-century literature and culture and is interested in animal 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 just co-edited the collected volume Texts, Animals, Environments: Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics (2019). You can contact her at frederike.middelhoff@uni-hamburg.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.
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 currently holding an Open Topic Postdoc Position at the Technical University Dresden. She was part of the DFG-funded project “Climate’s Time” at the University of Vienna and earned her doctorate at Ruhr-University Bochum in 2015 with a thesis on the Tunguska-Event, which has been published as Die Produktion der Katastrophe: Das Tunguska-Ereignis und die Programme der Moderne with transcript in 2017. Her current research project, “Precarious Nature,” examines proto-ecological knowledge in 19th century country-literatures. You can contact her at solvejg.nitzke@tu-dresden.de.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Urte Stobbe is Associate Professor at the German Department at University of Vechta (Germany). She received her Ph.D. 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.
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.
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.
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.