Brad Oberle is an Associate Curator in the Center for Conservation and Restoration Ecology at NYBG. His research seeks solutions to the climate and biodiversity crises in forests of cities and coastlines, where trees are most valuable and vulnerable.
2025 Plant Humanities Conversations: Soil Imaginaries
June 11, 2025
12 to 1:30 p.m. | Online
Plants are the primary ecosystem builders supporting all life on earth and profoundly shaping human societies, from food and medicine to art and culture. Yet 45% of all flowering plants are threatened with extinction. The wonder, fragility, and resilience of plant life are attracting strong public as well as scholarly interest. This series of online conversations brings together plant experts from different backgrounds who will share the important and captivating work they are doing to protect and foster biodiversity and—by extension—human diversity. The series expands the dynamic network of experts and institutions contributing to the burgeoning field of Plant Humanities, whose goal is to study and communicate the vital importance of plants to societies and ecosystems.
In the fourth session of this series, Dr. Yota Batsaki (Dumbarton Oaks) and Dr. Brad Oberle (NYBG) will engage with the cultural and ecological life of soil. Dr. Batsaki will explore how soil has been both represented and used as a living material in contemporary art practices, from the 1960s Land Art movement to the present. Meanwhile, Dr. Oberle will dive into the research conducted at the Thain Family Forest at NYBG to explain how a resilient old growth forest resists urban soil impairment.
The panel will be moderated by Lucas Mertehikian, Director of NYBG’s Humanities Institute.
This event is online and open to the public. You will receive a Zoom link to join the talk upon registration.
A Collaboration between NYBG’s Humanities Institute and Dumbarton Oaks.
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About the Speakers
Yota Batsaki is the Executive Director of Dumbarton Oaks. Previously, she was a Fellow and Director of Studies in English at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and a Newton Trust Lecturer in the English Faculty, University of Cambridge. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from Harvard University.
Her research interests lie in Enlightenment political economy and literature; the cultural history of plants in the modern period; and the movement of people, objects, and ideas in the eastern Mediterranean. She has coedited three volumes: The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century, with Sarah Burke Cahalan and Anatole Tchikine (Dumbarton Oaks, 2016); Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space, with Sahar Bazzaz and Dimiter Angelov (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013); and Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt, with Subha Mukherji and Jan-Melissa Schramm (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011). Batsaki has held fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge. In 2002, she cofounded the Harvard Summer Program in Greece, where she continues to teach. At Dumbarton Oaks, Batsaki also leads the Plant Humanities Initiative, originally seeded by a Mellon grant (2018-2023). Through an open access digital platform, the Plant Humanities Lab, and related scholarly programming, the initiative supports the growing field of plant humanities. Batsaki’s recent work has appeared in Environmental Humanities, Environmental History, and Critical Inquiry.
Location Online
Location Online