Projects

BOOK PROJECT

Shakespeare’s Sentient Trees: Plant Embodiment and Temporality

Description: This book will trace the appearance of trees and their constituent parts in five Shakespearean plays: Macbeth, The Tempest, 3 Henry VI, Richard III, and As You Like It. It aims to show these plays reveal arboreal agencies intra-acting with the characters of the play-texts by assessing the mergings of human and arboreal bodies, as well as instances of hacking and hewing inflicted across these bodies. Taking a critical plant studies approach informed by ecomaterialism, I argue that these sites of painful human-arboreal encounter in Shakespeare’s plays initiate potentials for thinking-with and feeling-with, across not only species (in the spirit of Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto) but also across biological kingdoms. I work to complicate philosopher Michael Marder’s theories of plant-thinking via these early modern depictions of and relations to trees, whose complex existences inform the texts in multiple registers. The trees of Shakespeare offer ways into theorizing plant-being that not only reflect early modern preoccupations but also resonate across the centuries, potentially serving as a bridge between historicist and presentist methodological concerns, a useful nexus for facing looming ecological issues like climate change, the effects of which long-lived trees bear bodily witness in their annual growth rings and in the shifting of leaf longevity.

SELECTED ARTICLE PROJECTS

“Does This Dress Make Me Look Anglo-Saxon?”: Other-Than-Human Clothing in the Exeter Book Riddles”

Description: The riddle poems of the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book have a long tradition of scholarly debate. What is particularly fascinating (or frustrating) about the collection is that it does not include an answer guide at the end of the manuscript to tell us the solutions to the riddles. While some riddles have generally agreed-upon solutions, others have never been satisfactorily solved, although this has not dissuaded determined scholars from continuing to make educated guesses. Reading the riddles as a collection does provide guessers with some common forms and thematic similarities; most noticeable is that many of the poems speak from the perspective of an object or a nonhuman animal, asking the listener to identify its name (the refrain is “Saga hwӕt ic hātte” – “Say what I am called”). This emphasis on both nonhuman speech and an elusive signifier invites thinking with the riddles and the riddlers from an ecomaterialist perspective that considers the material-semiotic dynamics at work in the poems. Specifically, I analyze the riddles’ use of clothing as a figure of animal skin or feathers and as a figure of a metageneric self-referentiality. In using clothing as a figure for skin, the riddles emphasize materiality; at the same time, the riddles reference their own semiotic and generic structure with the clothing metaphor since riddles, like clothing, always hide or obscure something. I suggest that the riddles draw attention to their own constructed form as a blurring of flesh and garment in order to highlight the interaction of the material and the semiotic. Attending to the way that riddles dress (and undress) themselves in the Exeter Book allows us insight not only into Anglo-Saxon material culture but also into the way that these riddles in particular emphasize the connections between language and the material world.

“Corvid Bodies at Work: Knowledge Production in the Animal Cognition Lab”

Description: The fate of crows has long been closely intertwined with that of humankind, but that relationship today is changing, as a result of our interactions with corvids in laboratories. These birds are captured, managed, given personal names, and released, recruited for the purpose of furthering our understanding of animal cognition. Sometimes considered pesky parasites or, slightly more generous, a “not-quite” companion species (Jönsson and Lenskjold), crows have nevertheless been in the media spotlight, heralded as model specimens of avian intelligence. Recent studies on corvid intelligence have made use of an experiment called “Aesop’s Fable paradigm,” which establishes corvid ingenuity by engaging crows in a series of increasingly difficult tasks that require them to drop stones into a pitcher to raise the water level. These studies compare modern-day crow test subjects to the thirsty, innovative crow of Aesopic tradition. My essay considers claims about science’s “proving” of ancient fabulistic knowledge in the context of the historical reception of the ever popular fables, in circulation since antiquity. By contrasting the traditional reception of Aesop’s thirsty crow fable to the appropriation of the fable within scientific discourse, I consider the extent to which crows participate in the creation of human knowledge through their engagement in animal cognition experiments as well as the way in which the role of the human observer is obscured in the interest of representing the experiments objectively. In attending to the unpredictable dynamics that emerge in the interaction between agential subjects, I utilize a feminist science studies approach to question the ability of science, authorized in these particular experiments by the “father” of fables, to objectivize these more-than-human bodily encounters into bodies of knowledge, both scientific and popular.