Registration is required.
Meets biweekly from 3-5 PM at the Center for the Study of World Religions.
Recent scientific research has shed light on the sophisticated ways plants and fungi sense, make sense of, and interact with the world. Alongside these discoveries is a wave of interest in the “more-than-human” humanities—a scholarship raising fundamental questions about the nature of the human and the non-human: 

• What is mind, where does it extend, and how?  
• How do plants and fungi trouble our understanding of “thinking” and perhaps cause us to reconsider what it means to be human?  
• What cultural frameworks give us opportunities to think about next means of engagement? 

In its third year of gathering, this reading group will explore these questions and more. Past scholarship has included works by thinkers such as Emanuele Coccia, Monica Gagliano, Suzanne Simard, and Michael Marder. All meetings will take place at the Center for the Study of World Religions and are organized by Natalia Schwien, PhD Student, Advisory and Programming Associate, Thinking with Plants and Fungi.  
  
Wednesday, January 29, 2025, 3 – 5 pm: An Ontological Separation of Human from Nature with Aaron Scott, Knight Science Journalism Fellow, MIT   
  
Wednesday, February 12, 2025, 3 – 5 pm: Empire & Earth with Rebecca McMackin, Horticulturalist, Garden designer, and Thinking with Plants and Fungi Associate   
  
Wednesdays, February 26, March 26, and April 23, 2025, 3 – 5 pm:  Special Workshop Series: The Arrogant Ape: Rethinking our Relationships to Others with Christine Webb, PhD, Author of The Arrogant Ape and Lecturer, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University (Co-sponsored by Interspecies Dialogues and The Thinking with Plants & Fungi Initiative)  
  
Wednesday, March 12, 2025, 3 – 5 pm: ArtLab Field Trip with Elitza Koeva, Artist and Postdoctoral Fellow, Thinking with Plants and Fungi Initiative  
  
Wednesday, April 9, 2025, 3 – 5 pm: Northern European Plant Magic & Folklore with Christina Oakley Harrington, Historian and CSWR Scholar-in-Residence 

Email plants@hds.harvard.edu to be added to the reading group mailing list

Instructor's bio:
Natalia is an herbalist, wildlife rescue & rehabilitation apprentice, and Ph.D. candidate in the Study of Religion at Harvard University, where she recently completed a Master of Theological Studies degree with a focus on the intersection of ecology and spiritual practice. She researches relational ontologies, posthuman ethics, and diction on personhood in scientific discourse, specifically neuroscience. Her secondary work is in Celtic Studies on trans-species soul migration in mythology and plants addressed in the vocative in Old Irish poetry. 
Her work has been featured in New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Time Out New York, Vice, For The Wild, and more. For more information + publications, visit selkieprojects.com. 
Subsequent meetings are: 2/12, 2/26, 3/12, 3/26, 4/9, 4/23