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Start date: Tuesday, January 20, 2026 |
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End date: Friday, May 8, 2026 |
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Mode of Instruction: In Person |
Course Description:
This seminar examines people's working relationships with live plants in the early modern world, c. 1500-1800, including through their gardening, farming, foraging, and forest work. Readings will be situated within larger historiographies of Indigenous sovereignty, colonialism, capitalism, slavery, antislavery, and revolution. Plants to be studied in global context may include nutmeg, pepper, sugar, maize, sunflower, rice, coffee, tea, cacao, vanilla, potato, cassava, wheat, cotton, flax, mulberry, indigo, mahogany, maple, pine, oak, tobacco, sassafras, and cinchona. The class will engage with the interdisciplinary fields of health humanities; critical study of botany and natural history; theories and histories of bioprospecting, biopiracy, seed sovereignty, and Indigenous science; intellectual histories of the African diaspora; climate studies; historical political ecology; and environmental humanities. |