Banu Subramaniam of Wellesley College to Deliver Lecture on Modern Plant Sciences The plant evolutionary biologist’s talk will be held on Feb. 10 at 5:30 p.m. on W&L’s campus.
Banu Subramaniam, professor and chair of women and gender studies at Wellesley College, will deliver a lecture titled “For the Love of Plants: Plant Worlds in the Shadows of Empire” at Washington and Lee University on Feb. 10 at 5:30 p.m. in Stackhouse Theater in Elrod Commons. The lecture is sponsored by Museums at W&L and the Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander Employee Resource Group within the Office of Inclusion and Engagement.
This event is free and open to the public and registration is encouraged: https://tiny.cc/love-of-plants. The lecture will also be streamed online at https://go.wlu.edu/livestream.
Subramaniam is the author of “Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism” and is a renowned plant evolutionary biologist and scholar in feminist science studies and environmental humanities.
In her talk, Subramaniam will reflect on how gender, race, class, sexuality and nation shape the foundational language, terminology and theories of the modern plant sciences, and how botanical theories remain grounded in the violence of their colonial pasts. Drawing on recent interdisciplinary scholarship in feminist, postcolonial and Indigenous studies, she wrestles with these difficult origins and lays a roadmap to imagine new biological frameworks that harness the power of feminist thought to reimagine and reinvigorate our love of plants.
Subramaniam’s lecture is inspired by Stephanie Shih’s “LONG TIME NO SEE (好久不見)” and “Emma Steinkraus: Impossible Garden/Dusk & Dawn,” currently on view at the Museums at W&L.
The Museums at W&L are open to the public Wednesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. To learn more about the 2024-2025 exhibitions, visit the Museums at W&L’s website.
You must be logged in to post a comment.