Land as Archive: Natural and Human Histories of the New York Botanical Garden
July 7–13, 2025 | July 21–27, 2025
How can we understand the history of the land as a multilayered object of inquiry? What humanistic and scientific disciplines need to come together to produce meaningful place-based scholarship? And how can we integrate different kinds of knowledge to counter the effects of climate change?
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Program Overview
Land as Archive: Natural and Human Histories of the New York Botanical Garden will consist of two one-week workshops hosted by the Humanities Institute at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG). NYBG will be a case study to read the land as a multilayered archive of human and non-human interactions and examine its history and cultural relevance to different peoples under the lens of its rich ecology.
Each workshop will host 20 participants working in the Humanities (in fields such as ecocriticism, cultural geography, and environmental history, among others) who want to develop analytical and practical skills and integrate scientific and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, environmental humanities, and archival resources into their place-based research and teaching practice. NYBG’s team of humanists and scientists will lead the workshops, along with guest scholars such as Native American History Professor Evan T. Pritchard and Asian American History Professor Ashanti Shih. Activities include lectures, discussion sessions, and hands-on explorations of the institution’s archives and land. They will emphasize experiential learning activities, including walking tours of the Thain Family Forest and the exposed bedrocks and glacial erratics of NYBG, a plant-pressing session in a Bronx community garden, and a walking tour of the Bronx River.
Why the New York Botanical Garden?
Founded in 1891, NYBG is the perfect site to bring together Humanities scholars and professionals from different backgrounds who want to engage in conversation with scientists, archivists, and community organizers to develop interdisciplinary place-based research.
As we will explore during the workshops, we can’t understand NYBG’s human-designed landscape without attention to the topographical and climate fundamentals that have shaped the place over millions of years: the Aquaehung (Bronx) River traversing the Garden grounds isn’t legible without the tools provided by ecologists, but also by Lenape historians and environmental activists; and the living organisms that thrive in the Garden, including plants and pollinators, can’t be fully appreciated without an understanding of both their biology and cultural significance to different peoples.
These geographical features are embedded in the landscape and arise from exploring human-produced archives, including historical maps, rare books, preserved plant specimens, and other records. Thus, NYBG, as both a site and a research institution, proves that place-based knowledge requires interdisciplinary collaboration and creative thinking as we reimagine what botanical gardens and the surrounding communities will look like in the future.
