This class invites you to develop a new kind of plant-consciousness. 

Our guides will be contemporary artists and writers who in the past two decades have been exploring human relationships with vegetal life in new ways, creating gardens in galleries, plant protagonists, and botany-based experiments in philosophy, architecture, music and more. We'll also learn from the new science of plant communication and learning, plant-based revisions of human history, anthropology's vegetal turn, and indigenous cultural knowledge about humans' place in the more-than-human world. 

But plants themselves will also be primary sources--or teachers--as you follow a sequence of exercises to deepen understanding of a plant "interviewee"; use multiple modes of research to become the resident expert on one plant species; and develop your own contribution to the vegetal humanities: plant knowledge learned and shared in disciplines outside the natural sciences.

Curious? There's a vegetal humanities preview here.

Is this class for you?

What you'll do in "Vegetal Humanities"

This class is open only to first-year students. It is not an art-making class (though there's some opportunity for non-written creative work). It can serve as an entry point to further coursework in either History of Art and Architecture or Art, Film, and Visual Studies, but you don't need any prior experience in the arts. Botanical knowledge is welcomed, but not expected or required. 

The "How to Interview a Plant" Project. At the start of the semester you’ll get a kit with container, soil, grow light, and seeds. As your plant sprouts and grows, you will post  observations  (#vegetalhumanities) and deepen your botanical attention through exercises developed by nature educator Craig Holdredge. 

The Plant Expertise Project. Each student in the class will be resident expert on a species or type of plant, of their choice. You'll follow a series of exercises to learn scientific, social, cultural, and procedural perspectives on the plant, and then design your own Vegetal Humanities project: an essay, short story, photograph series, podcast, film, or other project of your choosing.

Reading/Watching. Weekly readings for this course will be limited to about the length of a textbook chapter. Sometimes it will be a literary text, sometimes a scholarly essay, sometimes I'll assign a video to watch. These must be read/watched before class each week.

Talking/Listening. Each week in seminar I'll introduce works of art that illuminate a different question about plant/people relationships, and we'll discuss the art in relation to the assigned text. Some meetings will take place at the Harvard Art Museum, Museum of Natural History, Herbarium, or other destination.