{"id":36,"date":"2021-04-07T15:29:34","date_gmt":"2021-04-07T15:29:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.english.cam.ac.uk\/research\/plantlife\/?page_id=36"},"modified":"2022-05-15T18:59:58","modified_gmt":"2022-05-15T18:59:58","slug":"members","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.english.cam.ac.uk\/research\/plantlife\/members\/","title":{"rendered":"Members"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Spandan Banerjee <\/mark><\/strong>is one of the admins of this website. He also designed the plant directory<\/a>, a digital herbarium cataloguing various mentions of plants in literary texts. In terms of research, he works on\u00a0the relationship between botany and the history of pharmacy, on the hortus siccus<\/em> and the influence of pharmaceuticals (e.g. rosewater) in the ‘Circe’ chapter of Ulysses<\/em>, as well as the potential hallucinogenic effects of plant-based substances on the narrative style.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Debby Banham<\/mark><\/strong><\/a> is a medieval historian attached the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. She works on the social and cultural history of early medieval England, specialising in medicine, diet and food production, with a sideline in monastic sign language, and an increasing emphasis on gender. Her work covers archaeobotany, agriculture, and horticulture in early medieval England. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kasia Boddy<\/mark><\/a> <\/strong>is interested in evolving cultural resonances of plants across time and place; genres of garden writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Holly Corfield Carr<\/mark><\/a><\/strong> works on trees and plants (and the idea of greenery) in contemporary poetry and keen on thinking of the botanical in relation to wider concern with the \u2018non-human humanities\u2019. Working with Mina Gorji on a collaborative poem, thinking about weeding and reading and investigating a new form for writing about the sounds of flowering plants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steven Connor<\/mark><\/strong><\/a> is interested in the idea of family trees, or rather dendritic metaphor more generally, in tracing the links between philology, botany and biology, in imagining lines of descent and recension. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rebecca Field<\/mark><\/a><\/strong> is interested in medieval (and especially monastic) gardens, medieval herbal medicine, garden heritage, and the role of plants in manuscript production. She is also working on a series of ecological soundscapes for medieval monastic sites across the UK.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clarissa Hard<\/mark><\/strong> is interested in seeds and flowers in the poetry of Philip Larkin, D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sarah Houghton-Walker<\/mark><\/a> <\/strong>is thinking, as part of her interest in John Clare, about how the poet’s natural history writing negotiates between the general and the specific, and, relatedly, about the poet’s crafting of an appropriate representation of the natural world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bonnie Lander Johnson<\/mark><\/strong><\/a> is interested in late-medieval and early modern plants of any kind; in the ground, in literature and drama, in cultural practice and the visual arts. Editing The Cambridge Handbook of Literature and Plants<\/em>, a twenty-chapter overview of literary plants from the classical to the contemporary periods and across all global regions, and completing a monograph, Shakespeare’s Botany<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Laura McCormick Kilbride<\/mark><\/strong> works on the collusion between poetry and gardening, bringing different conceptions of Christian, secular, natural and seasonal time into productive conflict. As a Victorianist, she has long held an interest in the roots of the 1970s self-sufficiency movement in nineteenth-century writings which extol \u2018the simple life\u2019 from William Cobbett to Adrian Bell. Further interests include working-class style, in particular with rediscovering a style of cottage garden not mediated by later developments, such as the picturesque. She regularly attends the Garden and Landscape History Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alina Khakoo<\/mark><\/strong><\/a> is now working on contemporary British South Asian visual culture. She spent a year at Harvard Botany Libraries and Herbaria, exploring eighteenth and nineteenth-century British colonial compendia of Indian botany and is still closely following the brilliant work of Anna Arabindan Kesson and Emilia Terracciano on similar topics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Phil Knox<\/mark><\/strong><\/a> works on Roman de la Rose<\/em> and the medieval rose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Angela Leighton<\/mark><\/a><\/strong> is interested in plants and poetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kim Lifton<\/mark><\/strong> works on wilderness and representations of fenland landscapes in pre- and post-Conquest England with a focus on Croyland Abbey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ally Louks<\/mark><\/a> <\/strong>works on olfactory affect in relation to plants  – flowers, particularly, but also the emerging field of olfactory ecology\/ecocriticism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wanne Mendonck<\/mark><\/strong><\/a> wrote an MPhil thesis about the ‘botanical humanities’ in the 19th century. Primarily, his interest has been in the use of plants (in relation to nineteenth-century botanical developments) to organise information within literature (focusing on Ruskin and Swinburne).  In the early stages of the PhD, he looked at plants and anthropomorphism (in the works of Walter Crane and Margaret Gatty), as well as the radical heritage of Ruskin, Thoreau and others. He also looked briefly at the Victorian vegetarian movement, and popular botanical science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drew Milne<\/mark><\/strong><\/a> is interested in lichens, from their history and science to the poetics and politics of their representation (analogue and digital) extending into lichen poetics as a challenge to rhizomatic conceptions of writing and as a way of thinking differently about post-anthropocence extinction poetics. The history of visual culture associated with lichens \u2013 from their botanical illustrations and paintings through to film and visual culture more generally but perhaps with most bite in relation to 19th century drawings of lichens. Lichens cut across conventional divisions of species and plants \u2013 lichens aren’t, for example, readily assimilated within ideas of species and aren’t plants so much as symbiotic composites of different species, fungi and algae and \/ or cyanobacteria, not to mention micro-yeasts, bacteria and extremophiles such as tardigrades. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gillian Moore<\/mark><\/a> <\/strong>is interested in Flaubert and garden manuals; literary seaweed in Heaney, Morrison and New Weird literary sci-fi including Jeff VanderMeer and Rita Indiana.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amy Morris<\/mark><\/a> <\/strong>works on Transatlantic exchange in the 17th and 18 centuries (especially in North America); compilations of natural history description (such as Edward Taylor’s commonplace books & poetry); American indigenous knowledge (as in American Curiosity<\/em> by Susan Scott Parrish); William Bartram; native plants e.g. corn, puccoon, sweetgrass; eighteenth-century American garden design; plants in early American paintings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lisa Mullen<\/mark><\/strong><\/a> is interested in uncanny nature, subterranean eruptions, and strange fruit \u2013 forms (poetic and vegetal) which sprout on the borderline between the orderly taxonomic procedures of the botanical, and the recalcitrant, untidy, and invasive energies of wild growth. Her approach is via ecopoetics and radical landscape poetry, both in modernism and in contemporary literature of the Anthropocene. Deadly weeds; elfin fungi; history as monstrous harvest. She recently made a radio programme on the natural history and cultural impact of the blackthorn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jane Partner<\/mark><\/strong><\/a> is interested in tobacco in the early modern period; the ‘flowers of rhetoric’ and ideas about plants and gardens as ways of thinking about literary writing; flowering plants in emblems, book illustration, portraits and applied arts (especially fashion, embroidery and samplers). Practice-based research on a prose fiction project that involves botany and female experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sophie Read<\/mark><\/strong><\/a> works on seventeenth-century perfume, gardens, herbs, medicine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

James Riley<\/mark><\/strong><\/a> is interested in magical landscapes and various aspects of the ‘earth mysteries’ milieu. I am involved in the ongoing Alchemical Landscape project and have a current, specific, interest in 1970s health-oriented writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trudi Tate<\/mark><\/strong><\/a> is interested in plants and gardens in literature and refugee memoirs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andrew Taylor<\/mark><\/strong><\/a> works on medical humanism, transmission and reception of the key works from antiquity (and taxonomy\/epistemology), as well literary expressions in Latin and vernacular didactic poetry in various genres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Claudia Tobin<\/mark><\/a><\/strong> is interested in the sensory life of plants, plants and pigments, and plant-human relationships. She is working on a project on garden sanctuaries in the twentieth and twenty first centuries with Kasia Boddy, which will involve an exhibition with the Garden Museum in London and collaborations with the garden charities Horatio\u2019s Garden and the Lemon Tree Trust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marcus Waithe<\/mark><\/strong><\/a> is interested in Arts and Crafts garden culture (and the ways in which this embraces or decidedly excludes allotment\/smallholding culture).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hollie Wells<\/mark><\/strong> works on John Ruskin and the pastoral imagination, a topic which grows out of a fascination with both his botanical drawings and his gloriously outraged attempts, in Proserpina<\/em>, to make Linnaean botany chaste. This preoccupation with Ruskinian plant life is energised and sustained by gardens, seeds and mosses and by the tiny everyday marvels involved in helping things to grow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clair Wills<\/mark><\/strong><\/a> is interested in bees, trees and gardens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Georgina Wilson<\/mark><\/a><\/strong> works on the materiality of texts and the raw materials that went into paper-making, particularly in Europe in the 16th-18th centuries. One future project she has in mind is about humanist metaphors of gathering and garnering which stand in for the making of texts, and how the realities of paper production from plants realise those metaphors. She began thinking about the close-knit relationship between paper & plants from pressed flowers still extant in early modern herbaria, as well as the brown paper used to wrap seeds as they were sent across the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Laura Wright<\/mark><\/a> <\/strong>is a historical linguist, interested in how plant-names have been used in speech over the centuries.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spandan Banerjee is one of the admins of this website. He also designed the plant directory, a digital herbarium cataloguing various mentions of plants in literary texts. In terms of research, he works on\u00a0the relationship between botany and the history of pharmacy, on the hortus siccus and the influence of pharmaceuticals (e.g. rosewater) in the ‘Circe’ chapter of Ulysses, as well as the potential hallucinogenic effects of plant-based substances on the narrative style. Debby Banham is a medieval historian attached the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. She works on the social and cultural history of early medieval England, specialising […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-36","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.english.cam.ac.uk\/research\/plantlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.english.cam.ac.uk\/research\/plantlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.english.cam.ac.uk\/research\/plantlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.english.cam.ac.uk\/research\/plantlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.english.cam.ac.uk\/research\/plantlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":58,"href":"https:\/\/www.english.cam.ac.uk\/research\/plantlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/36\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1390,"href":"https:\/\/www.english.cam.ac.uk\/research\/plantlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/36\/revisions\/1390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.english.cam.ac.uk\/research\/plantlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}