Plant Humanities Symposium

Human history is inextricably entwined with the histories of plants, which have acted variously as co-creators of landscapes; agents of photosynthesis; sources of nourishment, healing, transcendence, and poisoning; adaptable participants in multispecies ecosystems; and central figures in human symbolic logics. Yet all too often, humans can fall prey to what Wandersee and Schussler (1999) have termed “plant blindness,” meaning the inability to recognize the significance of plants at a personal or global scale. The 2023 Plant Humanities Symposium at Yale aims to serve as a corrective to plant blindness by facilitating an interdisciplinary conversation about the relationships of plants to human cultures. Convening a distinguished set of scholars, including representatives of Dumbarton Oaks and the New York Botanical Garden Humanities Institute, the symposium will explore strategies for traversing the divide between the humanities and natural sciences to reach more holistic understandings of plant-human relations.

Hosted by Yale Environmental Humanities, with generous financial support from the Yale MacMillan Program in Agrarian Studies, Whitney Humanities Center, Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, Yale Institute for Biosph

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Poster