For the Love of Plants: Plant Worlds in the Shadows of Empire

The Geography and the Environment Colloquium Series

with Banu Subramaniam, Professor, Women's and Gender Studies, Wellesley College

Plant worlds are deeply entangled in human worlds. Drawing on recent interdisciplinary scholarship in feminist, postcolonial and indigenous studies, Banu Subramaniam reflects 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. Subramaniam 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 is the Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, Subramaniam engages the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology and is author of Botany of Empire (2024), Holy Science (2019) and Ghost Stories for Darwin (2016).

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