Plant Humanities Conference
September 15-17, 2022
Dumbarton Oaks
Organizers: Yota Batsaki and Anatole Tchikine
The relationship between plants and people is deep, complex, and asymmetrical. Plants are indispensable to our bodily needs—food, shelter, clothing, medicine—and weave themselves into our experience through ritual, religion, and art. Yet anthropogenic change threatens two out of five plant species with extinction. These pressing environmental challenges make an urgent call for a new dialogue between the humanities and science to point us to vital future directions for scholarship and action.
This conference is a capstone event of the Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It brings together distinguished thinkers and emerging scholars who research and communicate the fundamental importance of plants to human cultures. Beginning with an afternoon roundtable on September 15 and continuing over two days of presentations and discussions, the conference will take place at Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington, DC. The event will be open to the public and will also be livestreamed.
Thursday, September 15
Roundtable
Felix Driver, Royal Holloway, University of London
Ned Friedman, Arnold Arboretum
Jessica Harris, Queens College
Robin Kimmerer, State University of New York-ESF
Londa Schiebinger, Stanford University
Yota Batsaki, Dumbarton Oaks (moderator)
Friday, September 16
Food and Medicine Cultures
Judith Carney, University of California Los Angeles
Elizabeth Hoover, University of California Berkeley
Miranda Brown, University of Michigan
Anatole Tchikine, Dumbarton Oaks (moderator)
Legacies of Colonialism and Resilience
Jayson Porter, Brown University
Ashanti Shih, Vassar College
Rosalyn LaPier, University of Montana
John Beardsley, The Cultural Landscape Foundation (moderator)
Saturday, September 17
Aesthetics, Ethics, and Spirituality
Ioannis Fappas, Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens
Sumana Roy, Ashoka University
Temitayo Ogunbiyi, artist
Diana Sorensen, Harvard University (moderator)
Environment and Biodiversity
W. John Kress, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History
Rosetta Elkin, Pratt Institute
Gary Paul Nabhan, University of Arizona
John McNeil, Georgetown University (moderator)
Closing Remarks
Peter Crane FRS, Oak Spring Garden Foundation
Romita Ray, Syracuse University
Yota Batsaki, Dumbarton Oaks (moderator)
In-person registration is full.
Allison Janos
Project Coordinator, Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks