department news & events
Organized by Drs. Natania Meeker and Antonia Szabari, of the Department of French and Italian and the Department of Comparative Literature, together with the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute and the College Commons:
“The Spiritual Life of Plants”
“The Spiritual Life of Plants” series aims to reunite urgent contemporary conversations around ecology and the built environment with an early modern past—a past in which plants existed both at the limits of being and at the frontier of new forms of knowledge. In the early modern period, botanical investigations—and plant-like figures more generally—were often linked to radical shifts in ideas about human subjectivity and social life. What might these animated plants have to tell us about the ways in which humans experience, regulate, and are transformed by the non-human beings that surround them? How can we carry these conversations forward into the present—and the future?
Monday, March 23. A roundtable discussion and workshop. Taper Hall 170, 3:00-4:30 PM.
We invite faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates from across the university to join us for a stimulating conversation around the questions that compel our focus in plantlife: where does the boundary between plants and human beings lie, and what are the social effects of this boundary’s placement? What do plants have to tell us, and how can we read their language?
A selection of (exceptionally brief) excerpts from texts are available as pdf. files: Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis, La Mettrie’s Man A Plant, Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, and François Delaporte’s Nature’s Second Kingdom. Please RSVP to nmeeker@usc.edu or to szabari@usc.edu and to let us know that you are interested in joining us. Refreshments will be served.
With this first event in our series, we ultimately seek to galvanize new kinds of intellectual exchange in fostering a dialogue between scholarship based in the past and emergent work on non-human, biological and botanical objects. We welcome faculty and students alike, from all disciplines, with an interest in the enigmatic life of plants, from a wide variety of perspectives! Please stay tuned for our next events, including:
Thursday, April 2, 2009. A workshop with USC Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences Sarah Feakins, an expert in prehistoric climate change. Taper Hall 110 from 3:00-5:00 PM. Professor Feakins will talk to us about the role played by the plant in her own research and introduce to us a modern scientific perspective on plants as objects of knowledge.
Thursday, April 9, 2009. A lecture by historian of science François Delaporte on skin grafting in the sixteenth century and later. Prof. Delaporte is perhaps the most important representative of the epistemological approach to history and the history of science initiated in France by Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault. His published books include: Nature’s Second Kingdom: Explorations of Vegetality in the Eighteenth Century; Disease and Civilization, The History of Yellow Fever: An Essay on the Birth of Tropical Medicine, and The Anatomy of Passions. Taper Hall 170, 3:00-5:00PM
Friday, April 10, 2009. A symposium on “The Spiritual Life of Plants,” with a panel of eminent scholars including Dominique Brancher (Université de Genève), Tom Conley (Harvard), François Delaporte (Université de Picardie), Eleanor Kaufman (UCLA), and Pierre Saint-Amand (Brown). At the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, Overseers’ Room, from 10:00 AM to 4:00PM. Coffee, refreshments, and light lunch will be served.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009. A talk by literary scholar Monique Allewaert, assistant professor of English at Emory University, and author of “Swamp Sublime” (PMLA 123.2, March 2008). Taper Hall 170, 3:00-5:00 PM.