Faculty Favorites: Critical Interventions in the Plant Humanities

by The Editorial Board · Published February 5, 2026 · Updated February 5, 2026

In anticipation of our forthcoming special series, “Botanical Imaginations,” we invited scholars from across academic disciplines to share something plant-y they are excited to read/view and teach this academic semester. Their varied recommendations speak to the diversity of human-plant relations, taking us from the roadside hedge to the garden, from the plate to the lab, and from accounts of speculative fiction to physical, historic furniture. Collectively, these scholars show that our relations to—and knowledge of—plants are shaped by colonialism, racism and sexism, borders and migration, and climate change and environmental grief. Enjoy these botanical imaginations!

Yota Batsaki, Executive Director of Dumbarton Oaks, Principal Investigator of the Plant Humanities Initiative, Harvard University

Recommendation: Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan by Jon L. Pitt (Cornell University Press, 2025).

Book cover for Botanical Imagination by Jon L. Pitt. A tree, against a pink background, is divided into 4 horizontal panels. The book cover is light green.

The botanical trope may seem ubiquitous in Japanese aesthetics, yet it takes on new meanings in Jon Pitt’s deft analysis of Japanese literature and film from the past hundred years. While his close readings of poetry and visual media are fascinating in themselves, taken together they make a compelling case for historicity as a vital component of plant studies, which have tended to assume a philosophical and metaphysical bent.

The book also shines a spotlight on Japan as what I would call a “plant humanities hotspot,” a region of the world with a long tradition of plant cultivation as well as an abundant textual and material record of plant-human relationships.

Pitt’s final chapter on “Botanical Migration” reminds us that plants are constantly on the move, materially as well as metaphorically—and that humans “become botanical” in their transplantation and resurgence on new soil, and in their sense of rootedness and belonging.

Yota Batsaki co-edited The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century with Sarah Burke Cahalan and Anatole Tchikine (Harvard University Press, 2017).

Anna Bierbrauer, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Recommendation: Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science by Jessica Hernandez (North Atlantic Books, 2022).

Fresh Banana Leaves has been formative for how I think about environmental futures because it insists that ecological repair cannot be separated from cultural relationships. Hernandez centers Indigenous ways of knowing to show how dominant conservation and restoration frameworks—often framed as progressive or future-oriented—continue to reproduce colonial logics that sever people from plants.

What resonates most for me is her attention to displacement. Hernandez shows how forced migration, borders, and environmental change fracture long-standing human–plant relationships, particularly for Indigenous communities moving north from Central America and Mexico. In this framing, species loss is not abstract; it is lived as the loss of memory, practice, and kinship.

Hernandez’s concept of “misplaced relatives”—plants labeled as weeds or invasives after being moved through colonial systems—challenges the moral binaries that structure much environmental design. The book asks us to imagine environmental futures not as technical problems to solve, but as relational projects that require repair, responsibility, and humility.

Anna Bierbrauer is the author of “Herbarium as Archive” in Future Rural Archive, edited by Richard Saxton, Margo Handwerker, and Josh Garret-Davis (Last Chance Press, 2018). She has also worked with the Building Landscapes Culture Field School in Milwaukee to bring ecological perspectives into participatory, cultural analysis; see, The Field and The Grove.

Ruth Goldstein, Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Recommendation 1: Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism by Banu Subramanium (University of Washington Press, 2024).

Recommendation 2: Roots of Our Renewal: Ethnobotany and Cherokee Environmental Governance by Clint Caroll (University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

These two books are on my bedside table as well as my desk (and in my backpack) right now.

Subramaniam has been writing about plants, race, gender, sexuality, and immigration justice (in the United States) for several decades. Botany of Empire draws on her previous work, but with deeper engagement with queer and Indigenous studies to examine the long histories of Western botanical exploits. Clint Carroll’s Roots of Our Renewal highlights the connections among ethnobotany and Cherokee claims for political and territorial sovereignty. Human and plant histories intertwine in these two books, demonstrating both the roots of dispossession and the potential for cultivating the roots of renewal.

Ruth Goldstein is the author of Life in Traffic: Women, Plants, and Gold Along South America’s Interoceanic Highway (University of California Press, 2026).

Mary Kuhn, Associate Professor of English, University of Virginia

Recommendation: Soil: The Story of A Black Mother’s Garden by Camille T. Dungy (Simon & Schuster, 2024).

Camille Dungy’s memoir begins with her decision to move with her family from Oakland, California to Fort Collins, Colorado, a predominantly White town along the Colorado Front Range. Once settled, she begins the slow process of replacing the sod in her yard with a biodiverse garden, a process that reshapes her understanding of the natural world.

Soil is a celebration of plants, gardening, community, friendship, family, motherhood, and the art of paying attention. And it is a meditation on the legacies of slavery and settler colonialism and the ongoing realities of racism, from microaggressions to police violence, that continue to structure U.S. society. Soil offers a clear account of the ways that these histories are vital to how we understand the environment and the political crises we face today. Near the end Dungy writes, “I dig up a lot of awful history when I kneel in my garden. But, my god, a lot of beauty grows out of this soil as well.”

I first read Soil during my second daughter’s first year of life, and I deeply appreciated the book’s ability to capture how environmental meaning is made in the realm of the domestic and the everyday. One of the most beautiful aspects of the book is the way that it frames an environmental relation that is quotidian, domestic, and thickly peopled—with family, neighbors, friends near and far.

Dungy describes how in her own environmental education not so long ago, “Something about the environmental work I was trained in did not admit children, or the women who raise them, into the canon of work that writes about the wild.” Dungy reflects on how the demands of motherhood and domestic labor, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, shape her creative experience, both in the garden and in writing.

Mary Kuhn is the author of The Garden Politic (NYU Press, 2023).

Pablo Lapegna, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Georgia

Recommendation: “All at Once” in Above Ground by Clint Smith (Little, Brown and Company, 2023).

I often use Clint Smith’s poem “All at Once” when teaching environmental issues. A poem can convey images, sensations, and ideas in ways that academic texts rarely achieve. I find three themes expressed in particularly evocative and insightful ways in this poem.

First, Smith renders the global, epochal, world-spinning, structural issue of climate change in intimate, palpable tones. He weaves individual dramas with the tragic fate that humanity seems to be heading to, and connects the personal and the (geo)political through lyrical cadence.

Second, I like how he pries open the ambivalences of people and situations, gently inviting us to see that life takes its true meaning because of the inescapable fate of death.

Finally, Smith reminds us to cherish the small victories, joyful moments, and our connections to loved ones because they, like the world we live in, are evanescent.

Pablo Lapegna is the author of Soybeans and Power: Genetically Modified Crops, Environmental Politics, and Social Movements in Argentina (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Jared Margulies, Lecturer in Environmental Governance, Department of Geography, University College London

Recommendation: Wild and Wonderful: An Ethnography of English Naturalists by Vanessa Manceron, translated by Michael Taylor (The University of Chicago Press, 2025).

Wild and Wonderful by Vanessa Manceron offers a sensitive, rigorously researched accounting of English amateur naturalists. Manceron starts from a compelling, and for her, almost personal question: Why are the English so enamored with the practice of amateur naturalism, while the French are not?

Manceron undertakes to answer this question through close attention to how English naturalists derive meaning and satisfaction from weekly or daily outings to observe birds, hunt for butterflies, or botanize a roadside hedge. Her interlocutors are distinctly non-professional (and distinctly quirky!), but many are also real experts. In fact, these men and women are members of biodiversity conservation’s unsung vanguard: the first to raise the alarm over swings in species populations, the presence or absence of rare birds or bees, and even the subtleties of avifaunal communication.

While there is much to learn about English care for nature in this book, I also recommend it because it is a genuine treat to read, and the translation into English is stylishly handled by Michael Taylor. The nature detailed in this book is strikingly cozy and close at hand. Through the proximity and intimacy of the nonhuman world with English domestic life, Manceron so generously reads human modes of care between her naturalists and the species they both cherish and covet.

Jared Margulies is the author of The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade (University of Minnesota Press, 2023).

Marina Moskowitz, Professor of Design Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Recommendation: Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America by Jennifer Anderson (Harvard University Press, 2012).

As I was preparing to teach “Dimensions of Material Culture” this spring, I revisited a number of books and articles, and Jenny Anderson’s Mahogany came out on top—like it always does!

Anderson takes a “classic” subject of material culture studies—the elite furniture made from highly-prized mahogany in the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—and turns it on its head. Setting these artifacts in an environmental perspective, Anderson encourages readers to look beyond the highly polished surfaces of tea tables and tall chests, which seem to reflect only the socioeconomic world of the purchaser or owners, to truly understand the material processes that bring these objects into being.

Anderson helps us extend our understanding of “making” furniture to include the harvesting of raw materials. Where did early “American” mahogany come from? The artisanal workshops of Boston, Newport, or Philadelphia were (almost) final stops (just short of the consumer’s home) in a long commodity chain of extraction and transport. Originating in the rainforests of Central America and the Caribbean, the trade has substantial (and indeed devastating) effects to those environments as well as those en route.

Anderson also asks us to consider whose labor made this furniture, again extending the focus to include those who found and cut down the trees, cut it into lumber, and transported that lumber over sea and on land. This difficult and dangerous work was often carried out by enslaved persons. Anderson thus provides a model for productively combining the sources and methods of environmental history, labor history, and material culture.

(A note for teaching: Anderson also published an article-length treatment of this topic. This shorter piece is great for classroom use—one of my students said she would never think about historical artifacts she saw in a museum in the same way again—but treat yourself to reading the whole book!)

Marina Moskowitz is the author of Knitting in Scotland: Culture, Craft, and Industry with Lynn Abrams, Sally Tuckett, Roslyn Chapman, Lin Gardner (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026) and Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class in Modern America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

Banu Subramanium, Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Wellesley College

Recommendation 1: Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race by Sita Balani (Verso, 2023).

Recommendation 2: Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction by Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari (Fordham University Press, 2019).

I’m taking the liberty of recommending two wonderful books that will be interesting to read together.

Deadly and Slick is a powerful analysis arguing that the “trickery” of race is how it is embedded throughout everyday life, especially through the most intimate and essential: sexuality. What I loved about this book (especially chapter two) is how Balani traces the shared histories of the making of race across human and plant worlds. Gender and race, she persuasively argues, are suffused throughout. It is not accidental that so much of the plant sciences, their gendered and racialized vocabularies, classification and organizational structures, mirror human worlds. Could it be otherwise?

Radical Botany, especially read alongside Deadly and Slick, brings the wonderful imagination of historical speculative fiction about plants to life. Plants specifically serve as sites that exceed human categories of life. From fantasy to speculation, horror and humor, passion and indifference, exuberance and passivity, we come to question the place of humans in more-than-human worlds, and re-engage with plants as co-inhabitants. How delightful to image new worlds!

Banu Subramanium is the author of Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism (University of Washington Press, 2024).

Featured image: Leaves, from below. Photo by Agnieszka Palmowska, 2017.