ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Plant Humanities 2 - Rethinking Scientific Collections: Herbaria and Exsiccata

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This section uses plant collections to explore the different knowledge frameworks in which plants have been situated from the early modern period to the present and their evolving scientific and cultural significance. Through a focus on exsiccata—a mode of preservation particular to botany that straddles science and art, scientific and humanistic modes of interpretation—presenters will explore how early modern and modern practices of collecting, preservation, display, and circulation shape the ways that knowledge of plants has been generated and disseminated. How do we stabilize or contain plants to study them? What kinds of knowledge are lost or suppressed in the processes? How do these collecting frameworks feed into practices of the plantation, capitalism, and colonialism? What new uses are these collections finding today?

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Elena Canadelli, University of Padova

Individual Presentations

• The Story of a Victorian Fern Album - Felix Driver, Royal Holloway University of London

• Floral Messengers from Palestine: Biblical Plants as Spiritual Souvenirs and Scientific Specimens - Theo Detweiler, University of Cambridge

• Building the Herbarium Centrale Italicum in Florence: Mobility, Legal, and Logistical Challenges in the Transfer of the Webb Herbarium - Luca Tonetti, University of Padua

• Dried Algae as Mobile and Multilayered Objects: The Algal Herbarium of Achille Forti (1878–1937) - Claudia Addabbo, University of Padova

Session Organizers

• Elena Canadelli, University of Padova

• Yota Batsaki, Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University