The Greenhouse is a meeting place for students and researchers interested in the history and sociology of plants, food, agriculture and environment to explore how science and technology shape what we grow and eat.
The regular programme of papers and discussions is curated in junction with the project From Collection to Cultivation, which is funded by the Wellcome Trust.
We meet fortnightly on Thursdays, 1–2pm, via Zoom. All welcome! If you're outside the Department and keen to join us, please email hps-cultivation@lists.cam.ac.uk
Organised by Helen Anne Curry and Jessica J. Lee.
Lent Term 2021
Week 2 (28 January)
This week, we'll discuss a broad range of readings on plant classification, invasion ecologies, and 'weeds'.
- Harriet Ritvo. 'At the Edge of the Garden: Nature and Domestication in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain.' Huntington Library Quarterly 55, No. 3 (1992), pp. 363–378
- Catriona Sandilands. 'Dog Stranglers in the Park?: National and Vegetal Politics in Ontario's Rouge Valley.' Journal of Canadian Studies 47, no. 3 (2013): 93–122
Further reading (optional):
- Helen Anne Curry. 'Wanted Weeds: Environmental History in the Whipple Museum.' The Whipple Museum of the History of Science. 223–236. Cambridge: CUP, 2019.
- Harriet Ritvo. 'Invasion/Invasive.' Environmental Humanities 9, no. 1 (2017): 171–174.
Week 4 (11 February)
This week, we'll discuss readings on Indigenous food sovereignty (in advance of HPS guest speaker Elizabeth Hoover).
- Elizabeth Hoover. '"You Can't Say You're Sovereign if You Can't Feed Yourself": Defining and Enacting Food Sovereignty in American Indian Community Gardening.' American Indian Culture and Research Journal 41, no. 3 (2017): 31–70.
- Kyle Whyte. 'Indigenous Food Sovereignty, Renewal and U.S. Settler Colonialism.' The Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics, Forthcoming.
Week 6 (25 February)
This week, we'll discuss readings on plant health, quarantine, and epidemics, ahead of our speaker Stuart McCook on 11 March.
- Jennifer K. Sedell. 'No fly zone? Spatializing regimes of perceptibility, uncertainty, and the ontological fight over quarantine pests in California.' Geoforum, in press (published online 2019).
- Jessica Wang. 'Plants, insects, and the biological management of American empire: tropical agriculture in early twentieth-century Hawai'i.' History and Technology 35, no. 3 (2019): 203–236.
Week 8 (11 March)
Speaker: Stuart McCook
This week, we'll hear from speaker Stuart McCook from the University of Guelph, with a talk titled 'A Fragile Abundance: The Roots of Unsustainability in the Global Coffee Industry'.