Professor Subha Mukherji is delighted to take up a Visiting Fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard University research institute, supported by a Garden and Landscape Studies Research Award, from 1-30 September 2026. She is hoping to use the opportunity to research early modern garden designs and the horticultural thinking behind mazes and their interface with architectural conceptions of the labyrinth, to understand the origins of the symbolic uses of the labyrinth as a space or a metaphor of knowing in early modern culture - across ‘literary’ and ostensibly non-literary domains. She will also start exploring the history of plant taxonomy in connection with early modern poetry about plant-human relations.
Professor Subha Mukherji is delighted to take up a Visiting Fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard University research institute, supported by a Garden and Landscape Studies Research Award, from 1-30 September 2026. She is hoping to use the opportunity to research early modern garden designs and the horticultural thinking behind mazes and their interface with architectural conceptions of the labyrinth, to understand the origins of the symbolic uses of the labyrinth as a space or a metaphor of knowing in early modern culture - across ‘literary’ and ostensibly non-literary domains. She will also start exploring the history of plant taxonomy in connection with early modern poetry about plant-human relations.
'From maze to amazement'
While at Dumbarton Oaks, Professor Mukherji will give a talk to the Garden and Landscape Studies seminar on ‘From maze to amazement: the labyrinth in the early modern imaginary’.
