Humanities Now

Humanities Now, a new lecture series at the Whitney Humanities Center, is designed to spark deep thinking, inclusive deliberation, and smart action on current intellectual and social concerns.

Founded in 2023 by WHC director Cajetan Iheka, Humanities Now convenes a thoughtful community to explore important topics in the humanities today. This exploration takes place through conversations with leading scholars, writers, artists, and thinkers who are shaping humanistic discourse, praxis, and activism with their cutting-edge work. Humanities Now derives impetus from a global vision of the humanities: one that embraces interdisciplinarity, reflects a range of disciplinary constellations, and accentuates the heterogenous humanistic traditions within the United States and across the world. It prioritizes innovative approaches to the humanities, especially those that break intellectual boundaries and dismantle walls between the university and broader communities.

We welcome suggestions for speakers/artists who bring fresh perspectives to enduring and new questions in the humanities.

Fall 2024 Lectures

Sumana Roy

writer and poet

Thursday, September 12, 2024 | 4:30 pm

Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)

Alice Cinema (L01)

The Quest for the Plant Script

If plants could write, what stories would they tell us? What might we learn—about ourselves and the botanical world—if we learned to read, write, and translate a language rooted in vegetal life?

Join Sumana Roy as she explores why these questions have captivated our writers, artists, thinkers, and scholars over the last hundred years. In this lecture, Roy traces the evolution of our century-long fascination with the “plant script,” a term she uses to describe our various attempts to parse a language from plants.

“The Quest for the Plant Script” begins with nineteenth-century scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose’s concept of torulipi—or “plant script”—a record of a plant’s responses to external stimuli written in their own “handwriting,” through which he hoped plants would write their autobiographies. Starting with Bose’s experiments and moving through Rabindranath Tagore’s songs about the “language of flowers,” to poets writing about the syntax of falling leaves, to artists trying to coax a vocabulary out of plants, or creating a “tree alphabet,” Roy examines our ongoing search for the plant script, its codes, its compulsions, and its intimate histories.

Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree and Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries, Missing: A Novel, My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories, and two poetry collections, Out of Syllabus and V. I. P: Very Important Plant.