Call for abstracts!
Julia Sarreal, principal investigator of a spring 2025 Humanities Institute seed grant, Planting the Americas, is seeking abstracts for her upcoming workshop The Roots of the Americas: Multidisciplinary Histories of New World Plants on October 8-10, 2026 at the Tempe campus.
Details and eligibility
This conference seeks to bring together historians and historically-minded scholars whose work focuses on the relevance of native plants of the Americas, ranging from the pre-Columbian era to the present. The histories of native American plants offer multiple entry points into the study of the Indigenous past, interethnic relations, medical knowledge and culinary practice, modes of production and economic development, region and nation formation. In approaching histories of native plants in the Americas as windows onto socioeconomic structures, cultural expression, epistemologies, and relations of power, we welcome contributions that are empirically rich, methodologically innovative, and conceptually sophisticated. Topics of special interest tied to the knowledge production, adaptation, circulation, and representation of native plants of the Americas might include: Native Plants of the New World and Histories of Science, Medicine and Technology; Indigenous Religions, Christianity and Native Plants; Native Plants, Modes of Production and Consumerism; Native Plants, Industrial Inputs and Industrial Food Systems; Native Plants and Nationalism in the Americas; Stigmatization of Native Plants; and Native Flora and Biodiversity Protection.
We welcome contributions from the fields of natural history, the history of science and medicine, environmental history, food history, ethnohistory, cultural history, anthropology, cultural studies, ethnobotany and plant humanities. Paper proposals offering historical studies of less documented North and South American plants are particularly encouraged.
How to submit a proposal for the conference
Please e-mail Julia Sarreal ([email protected]) and Seth Garfield ([email protected]) by February 28 with a paper title, abstract (350-word maximum) and a current CV. Completed papers should be 7,000 words. Accommodations and meals will be provided. The anticipated outcome of the workshop is the publication in an edited volume or special edition of a journal.