Luísa Black is an artist, educator, and ecologist who works as the Resilience Manager at the Elizabeth River Project in Norfolk, Virginia. A first generation Brazilian-American, she draws great inspiration from the rich coastal ecology of both Virginia and Rio de Janeiro, where her family still lives.

Xan Chacko is Lecturer in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at Brown University. She is the co-editor of Invisible Labour in Modern Science (Rowman and Littlefield: 2022). Her current book, The Last Seed: Botanic Futures in Colonial Legacies, demonstrates how concepts like ‘biodiversity’ are evoked to enable the continuation of extractive colonial practices like plant collecting.

Cat Dawson, Ph.D. (Guest Faculty, Sarah Lawrence College) works at the intersection of art history, and feminist, queer & trans studies, exploring the cultural production of minoritized subjects in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Their first book, Monumental: Race, Sexuality, Representation, Culture is forthcoming from MIT Press. Their second, Trans Form, has been solicited by MIT.

Gabi Dondes is a sophomore at Smith College majoring in Neuroscience with a Minor in Chemistry. As a STRIDE scholar, Dondes has been co-organizing two exhibits focused on Sylvia Plath: “The Bell Jars: Lyman Conservatory and Sylvia Plath’s Botanical Imagination” at the Smith Botanic Garden, and “Sylvia Plath’s Life as a Student at Smith College” at the Smith Special Collections.

JJJJJerome Ellis (any pronoun) is a disabled animal, artist, and person who stutters. Through music, performance, writing, video, and photography, the artist asks what stuttering can teach us about justice and care. Ellis lives in Norfolk, VA with their wife, ecologist-poet Luísa Black Ellis.

Elaine Gan is an interdisciplinary artist-theorist who works at the intersections of feminist science and technology studies (STS), environmental humanities, multispecies/cyborg anthropology, and digital art. Gan’s creative-critical practice explores transformations of species as machines and data, with a special interest in crops and de/colonial botany. She is co-editor of an anthology titled Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Minnesota 2017) and assistant professor of STS at Wesleyan University. https://elainegan.com

Jess Gersony is a plant physiologist, artist, and educator. She is passionate about exploring human-planet interactions through both scientific and artistic inquiry, and strives to do this work through an intersectional, social justice lens. The ultimate goals of her work are to increase and deepen our awareness of (and relationship to) the natural world, to further diversity, equity and inclusion in STEM spaces, and to improve our understanding of how plants are responding to climate change. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor at Smith College where she leads the PLACE (PLant physiology, Art, and Community Engagement) Lab.

Amanda Golden is Associate Professor of English at New York Institute of Technology and a Research Affiliate at Smith College. She is the author of Annotating Modernism: Marginalia and Pedagogy from Virginia Woolf to the Confessional Poets (2020), co-editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath (2022), and editor of This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton (2016). She is currently co-editing The Poems of Sylvia Plath, a new, scholarly, annotated edition of Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems, with Karen V. Kukil.

Lily Gurton-Wachter is Associate Professor of English at Smith, and teaches courses in Romanticism, environmental poetry, hybrid genres, and more. She is the author of Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention (Stanford University Press, 2016) and is currently writing about sympathy, colonial natural history, abolition, and the counter-sentimental in both Romantic and contemporary poetry and poetics.

Mariam Habib is a senior at Smith College completing her undergraduate degree double-majoring in Psychology and Anthropology. She is a photographer, writer, travel enthusiast, bookworm, and nature lover. Post-grad she hopes to pursue work in public health, social justice, and community engagement.

Colin Hoag is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Smith College. He is the author of The Fluvial Imagination: On Lesotho’s Water-Export Economy (University of California Press, 2022) and is currently working on two new research projects. One is focused on plant conservatories and the other examines the biogeography of the cosmopolitan plant family, Compositae.

Krista Lynes is Professor of Communication Studies and Director of the Feminist Media Studio at Concordia University. They are the author of Prismatic Media, Transnational Circuits and co-editor of Moving Images: Mediating Migration as Crisis. Their current research project, Greenhouse Effects: The Mediation of Life and the Migration of Labor, seeks to explore how greenhouses have been a central infrastructure for the racialized, classed, and gendered global movement of humans, plants, animals, knowledge, and culture.

Kimiko Matsumura is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Lake Forest College specializing in modern and contemporary art. Her research addresses histories of scientific display and illustration, the role of visual culture in shaping knowledge and knowledge-making practices, and artistic reinterpretations of scientific imagery.

Caroline Melly is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Sherrerd Center at Smith College. Her current research considers the contemporary resurgence of cannabis medicine, asking what this scientific and social revival might teach us about health and well-being, care and kinship, and “good medicine” after the pharmaceutical age.

Emilia Neyer is a sophomore at Smith College double-majoring in Biological Sciences and Psychology. As a STRIDE scholar, she has worked alongside Prof. Colin Hoag on the curation of “The Bell Jars: Lyman Conservatory and Sylvia Plath’s Botanical Imagination” exhibit, which is on view at the Smith College Botanic Garden through the 2023-2024 academic year. Outside of this project, she harbors a strong interest in plant ecology, which she pursues through her research in the Bellemare lab and as a curatorial assistant and conservation intern at the Smith College Botanic Garden.

Melissa Parrish is an Assistant Professor of English and affiliated faculty in American Studies at Smith College, where she teaches postwar American literature. She is currently completing a book manuscript, titled Situation Normal: Emergency Poetics and the Rise of the National Security State, which explores the way poetry reveals and resists the U.S. national security state’s prominent role in shaping state-sponsored emergencies.

Mary Pena‘s work explores intersections of race and gender, visual and material culture, urban ecology, embodiment, and Afro-diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean. She also has a strong interest in multimodal scholarship, curation, and critical digital humanities. Pena holds a PhD in Anthropology and a graduate certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Michigan.

Kathleen Pierce is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Smith College. Her research and teaching explore intersections of art and medicine in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French empire, attending closely to intersections of gender, race, animality, health, power, and visuality. She has recently published scholarly writing in Art Journal Open, Buildings & Landscapes, and Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal.

Javier Puente is Associate Professor and Chair of the Latin American and Latino/a Studies program at Smith College, where he also serves as Faculty Liaison of the Lewis Global Studies Center. His first book, The Rural State (University of Texas Press, 2022) received the 2023 Marrysa Navarro Best Book Award by the New England Council of Latin American Studies.

Malcolm Sen is Associate Professor in the Department of English at UMass Amherst. He leads the university’s Environmental Humanities Initiative and is the co-chair of the Sustainability Strategy Working Group. His research focuses on questions of sovereignty, migration, and race as they emerge in climate change discourse. Sen’s monograph Unnatural Disasters: Irish Literature, Climate Change and Sovereignty is under review.

Ashanti Shih is Assistant Professor of History at Vassar College. Her work focuses on Asian American environmental knowledges, Native Pacific studies, and the history of colonial science in the twentieth-century Pacific. Shih is the Arnold Arboretum’s 2023 Sinnott Award recipient, and she serves on the Advisory Committee for the Dumbarton Oaks Plant Humanities Initiative.

Ada Smailbegovich is Associate Professor of English at Brown University working at the intersection of poetics and the natural sciences. She is the recent author of Poetics of Liveliness: Molecules, Fibers, Tissues, Clouds (Columbia University Press) and a collection of poems The Cloud Notebook (Litmus Press).

Banu Subramaniam is the Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, Banu engages the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology and is author of forthcoming Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism.

Jean-Thomas Tremblay is assistant professor of environmental humanities at York University, in Toronto. He is the author of Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2022), a co-author, with Steven Swarbrick, of the forthcoming Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, 2024), and a co-editor, with Andrew Strombeck, of Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s (State University of New York Press, 2021).