Maura C . Flannery
My research is on historical and philosophical topics dealing with visual aspects of biology. I am currently investigating the role of herbaria in plant science today as well as historically. I discuss my work on my Herbarium World blog at http://HerbariumWorld.Wordpress.com.
Supervisors: Dr. Cecily Cannon Selby
Address: Aiken, SC
Supervisors: Dr. Cecily Cannon Selby
Address: Aiken, SC
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And yet, despite this robust botanical history, many humans are now notably “blind” to the plants that not only sustain us but also that share our world. Such “plant blindness” renders us insensitive to both the lives of plants and to the deeply textured sociocultural history of plant-human interactions. Perhaps most significantly, our inability to see plants locally renders us blind to the significant consequences of human action on plant communities globally.
Far from residing in the distant past, these individual records of plants are gaining new life as records of both disappeared, and disappearing, worlds. Global herbaria constitute our Ur-text, our Herbaria 1.0; the digitizing and collection of these historical specimens constitute the 2.0 of our title. Our Herbaria 3.0 engages with the resurgence of herbaria as important repositories of botanical and environmental knowledge. The project aims to transform, even dissolve, the human-plant boundary by using the herbarium as both material object and metaphor for plant-human interaction.
Our session will address both, plants as scientific objects and plant science as carriers of a broad range of political, sociological, psychological, historical, esthetical, and symbolic meanings. The four talks will investigate the mutual interplay in four different dimensions of knowledge production and knowledge display: arrangement in collections (herbaria, xyloteques), in semi-public spaces (parks), and in literature. The focus is on the 18th and 19th centuries. The common bond regards the questions of how these forms express and/or question the social and scientific conventions of their time, which specific sets of explicit and hidden signs they adopt, and what kind of visual, verbal and sensitive messages they transport.
Maura C. Flannery: Making Plants into Status Symbols
Anna Svensson: “Specimens of Woods:” A natural history of the pianoforte
Ariane Dröscher: Romantic gardens as spaces of knowledge
Joela Jacobs: Dangerous Entanglements: Writing Plants, or Phytopoetic Agency in the German Literary Imagination