Currently Available Writings
**Links are provided through article titles. If you would like full copies of any article, you may also contact me directly (see contact page)
“'Her Flowers are Her Children': Cultivating Victorian Houseplant Motherhood in Colonial Archives" Journal of Ecohumanism (Special Issue: Labors of Love and Loss. Radical Acts of Human, Plant, and Nonhuman Mothering" guest edited by Alexa Dare and Vail Fletcher) 2.01 (2023)
This essay introduces the figure of Victorian “plant mother” whose houseplant amities provide an alternative model of motherhood within nineteenth-century colonial archives. I argue that compiling instances of her dispersed presences across archival documents reveals a flexible avatar of motherhood who restores maternity’s embodied and emotional dimensions. Not simply an agent of colonialism, the plant mother and her plants provide moments of transformation that coax out of colonial archival structures more inclusive models of domesticity, family, and belonging. To access these moments, I build a framework for interpreting nineteenth-century archival materials that braids feminist and critical plant studies perspectives that share commitments to expanding understandings of archives in their theoretical and material forms. This essay reconstructs the lives of Victorian plant mothers from plant births to deaths. Through these archival reconstructions, I insist that Victorian houseplant mothers show us how to locate nodes of loving resistance within colonial archival structures.
This essay introduces the figure of Victorian “plant mother” whose houseplant amities provide an alternative model of motherhood within nineteenth-century colonial archives. I argue that compiling instances of her dispersed presences across archival documents reveals a flexible avatar of motherhood who restores maternity’s embodied and emotional dimensions. Not simply an agent of colonialism, the plant mother and her plants provide moments of transformation that coax out of colonial archival structures more inclusive models of domesticity, family, and belonging. To access these moments, I build a framework for interpreting nineteenth-century archival materials that braids feminist and critical plant studies perspectives that share commitments to expanding understandings of archives in their theoretical and material forms. This essay reconstructs the lives of Victorian plant mothers from plant births to deaths. Through these archival reconstructions, I insist that Victorian houseplant mothers show us how to locate nodes of loving resistance within colonial archival structures.
"Littoral books: archiving oceanic memory through pressed and printed plants “ European Journal of English Studies ("Victorian Materialisms" 26.1 (2022)
This article explores the expansive sets of archival practices that contributed to the creation of Charles Anderson’s Sea Mosses herbarium (1873) to demonstrate how the herbarium transforms the metaphorical “book of nature into a lively, dynamic oceanic archives. To underscore the registers of ecological archiving and reading taking shape through Anderson’s album, I introduce the “littoral book.” Alluding to the shoreside littoral zones where Victorian botanists collected seaweed, the littoral book is a material-conceptual book object founded on plant-human-text interconnectivities that invites humans to dwell within the ocean and its vegetal inhabitants. I introduce theoretical interlocutors with shared investments in materiality, book history and material ecocriticism, to map out forms of botanical archiving rooted in the littoral zone’s motions and materials. To capture the timeless and historicized, the sedimentary and dynamic, the territorial and amorphous qualities of the ocean’s littoral zones, I conduct close material analyses of Anderson’s album while initiating broader acts of speculative historical reconstruction by tracing the techniques Anderson used for creating his herbarium – including specimen mounting, arranging, and labelling. This study of Anderson’s Sea Mosses reveals how the littoral book functions as an immersive, dynamic archive of oceanic memory.
Book Review: Kathleen Davidson, Photography, Natural History and the Nineteenth-Century Museum: Exchanging Views of Empire and Ann Elias, Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity History of Photography 44.4 (2020)
This article explores the expansive sets of archival practices that contributed to the creation of Charles Anderson’s Sea Mosses herbarium (1873) to demonstrate how the herbarium transforms the metaphorical “book of nature into a lively, dynamic oceanic archives. To underscore the registers of ecological archiving and reading taking shape through Anderson’s album, I introduce the “littoral book.” Alluding to the shoreside littoral zones where Victorian botanists collected seaweed, the littoral book is a material-conceptual book object founded on plant-human-text interconnectivities that invites humans to dwell within the ocean and its vegetal inhabitants. I introduce theoretical interlocutors with shared investments in materiality, book history and material ecocriticism, to map out forms of botanical archiving rooted in the littoral zone’s motions and materials. To capture the timeless and historicized, the sedimentary and dynamic, the territorial and amorphous qualities of the ocean’s littoral zones, I conduct close material analyses of Anderson’s album while initiating broader acts of speculative historical reconstruction by tracing the techniques Anderson used for creating his herbarium – including specimen mounting, arranging, and labelling. This study of Anderson’s Sea Mosses reveals how the littoral book functions as an immersive, dynamic archive of oceanic memory.
Book Review: Kathleen Davidson, Photography, Natural History and the Nineteenth-Century Museum: Exchanging Views of Empire and Ann Elias, Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity History of Photography 44.4 (2020)
Victorian #PlantParenthood: Houseplants, Love, and Domestic Rearrangements Journal of Victorian Culture Online (May 2021)
19 Cents Q & A Interview with Nineteenth-Century Studies Association (April 2020)
"Anna Atkins," The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing
Anna Atkins (1799–1871) is a key, though overlooked, player in histories of photography and botany. Atkins’s major artistic projects exemplify how networks of correspondence knit from institutional and domestic affiliations both heightened and erased the historical visibility of women scientists throughout the Victorian period. Atkins was the daughter of John Children, an eminent nineteenth-century scientist who invited Anna into his institutional circles. Father and daughter collaborated in 1823 when she supplied the illustrations for Children’s translation of Lamarck’s Genera of Shells. For her next project, Atkins’s collaborative network expanded to include her father’s scientific contemporaries. From her father’s friend, astronomer John Herschel, Atkins learned a new photographic printing process that produced cyanotypes or blueprints. Atkins parlayed this into her most well-known project, a convergence of art and science titled British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions that spanned a decade (1843–1853). Atkins gifted these different albums to friends, fellow scientists, and scientific institutions. Self-published, British Algae is now considered the first photographically illustrated book. Until recently, however, Henry Fox Talbot’s 1844 commercial venture, The Pencil of Nature, eclipsed Atkins’s formative position in photographic publishing. After completing British Algae, Atkins, with the help of her “like a sister” Anne Dixon, expanded her cyanotype-making repertoire to include ferns, feathers, and lace, culminating in a final co-produced volume, Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns (1854). Her final phase of artistic output signaled a move away from printmaking and a turn toward writing, which included her father’s memoirs, Memoir of J.G. Children (1853), and popular fiction.
"Botany," The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing
This entry maps out the broad range of activities underpinned by networks of women and plants that united under the name of botany. Even though the nineteenth-century professionalization of botany sought to distance the science from its potentially feminine connotations as a “polite” pursuit, women’s contributions to the field flourished in an impressive array of media and forms that connected science, literature, and the arts. At its core, Victorian botany was a science dedicated to exploring and managing plant life, which encompassed studies of external plant structure (morphology) and functions (physiology), as well as efforts to develop classification systems. However, these roots of plant science also provided for rich literary and artistic expressions that bridged popular and institutional, domestic, and public venues. Throughout the nineteenth century, plants became prized subjects (as well as raw materials) for poems, travelogues, biographies, scrapbooks, photographs, paintings, and textiles. Rather than a science of isolating and controlling plant life, botany for women was founded on connectivity: not only did women forge communities with one another through botanizing, but they also established connections between themselves and the plants with which they closely worked.
Anna Atkins (1799–1871) is a key, though overlooked, player in histories of photography and botany. Atkins’s major artistic projects exemplify how networks of correspondence knit from institutional and domestic affiliations both heightened and erased the historical visibility of women scientists throughout the Victorian period. Atkins was the daughter of John Children, an eminent nineteenth-century scientist who invited Anna into his institutional circles. Father and daughter collaborated in 1823 when she supplied the illustrations for Children’s translation of Lamarck’s Genera of Shells. For her next project, Atkins’s collaborative network expanded to include her father’s scientific contemporaries. From her father’s friend, astronomer John Herschel, Atkins learned a new photographic printing process that produced cyanotypes or blueprints. Atkins parlayed this into her most well-known project, a convergence of art and science titled British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions that spanned a decade (1843–1853). Atkins gifted these different albums to friends, fellow scientists, and scientific institutions. Self-published, British Algae is now considered the first photographically illustrated book. Until recently, however, Henry Fox Talbot’s 1844 commercial venture, The Pencil of Nature, eclipsed Atkins’s formative position in photographic publishing. After completing British Algae, Atkins, with the help of her “like a sister” Anne Dixon, expanded her cyanotype-making repertoire to include ferns, feathers, and lace, culminating in a final co-produced volume, Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns (1854). Her final phase of artistic output signaled a move away from printmaking and a turn toward writing, which included her father’s memoirs, Memoir of J.G. Children (1853), and popular fiction.
"Botany," The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing
This entry maps out the broad range of activities underpinned by networks of women and plants that united under the name of botany. Even though the nineteenth-century professionalization of botany sought to distance the science from its potentially feminine connotations as a “polite” pursuit, women’s contributions to the field flourished in an impressive array of media and forms that connected science, literature, and the arts. At its core, Victorian botany was a science dedicated to exploring and managing plant life, which encompassed studies of external plant structure (morphology) and functions (physiology), as well as efforts to develop classification systems. However, these roots of plant science also provided for rich literary and artistic expressions that bridged popular and institutional, domestic, and public venues. Throughout the nineteenth century, plants became prized subjects (as well as raw materials) for poems, travelogues, biographies, scrapbooks, photographs, paintings, and textiles. Rather than a science of isolating and controlling plant life, botany for women was founded on connectivity: not only did women forge communities with one another through botanizing, but they also established connections between themselves and the plants with which they closely worked.
"Impressions of Plants Themselves: Materializing Eco-Archival Practices with Anna Atkins' Photographs of British Algae" in Victorian Literature and Culture 47.2 (2019)
**winner of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association's Emerging Scholar prize for 2020
Centered on readings of Anna Atkins’ Photographs of British Algae; Cyanotype Impressions (1843-1853), this essay works toward establishing a poetics of “eco-archiving” that braids the material turns in feminist ecocriticism and book history. Comprised of nearly one thousand prints, Atkins’ Photographs Impressions project activates an experimental cyanotype (blue print) process combining the labors of humans, plants, and their environments. Reading Anna Atkins’ Photographs alongside contemporary material ecocriticisms fleshes out environmentally sensitive documentary practices that resist the deadening, anthropocentric imperatives associated with traditional models of archiving. I chart the material-emotional history of Atkins’ Photographs, from its creation as a father-daughter project to its continuous dissemination as a series of unbound manuscripts. Not simply documenting human mastery over nature, the lifecycles of Atkins’ volumes generate lively connective tissues among texts, humans, and environmental agents to envision a set of archival practices shared by women, plant-life, and the weather. Anna Atkins’ Photographs materializes expansive ecologies of archival authorship, preservation, and stewardship to recast Victorian scientific archives as spaces for fostering ethical encounters between plants and humans.
"Disjecta Membra: the archival seriality of Cecilia Glaisher's Nature Printed (1857) in Nineteenth-Century Contexts: an Interdisciplinary Journal 40.5 (2018)
This article resists the twin time-bound narratives of Victorian archival stability and contemporary archival dynamism by unpinioning Victorian botanicals and asking: how do plants archive life? To answer this question, I look to archival reading practices generated by two overlapping botanical projects from the mid-nineteenth-century "fern-craze," Cecilia Glaisher's album Nature Printed (1857) and Edward Newman's History of British Ferns (1840-1865). When taken together, Glaisher and Newman's projects posit performances of reading that require us to remain attentive to the entwined and animate processes contributing to the developments of plants and archives; I call this "circinate reading." "Circinate" refers to the gyrating, swiveling, and uncoiling motions of fern fronds as they develop along the rachis (the steim) and through the pinna (the leaflets.) I adapt circination as a template for an expansive, speculative reading practice that moves beyond interpreting individual specimens to reconstruct an ecosystem of mid-century botanical archiving practices that illuminate the developmental patterns of archives. Tapping into the responsive relational dynamics of plant life, circinate reading invites us to braid together the parallel, intersecting, and dovetailing developmental cycles of Glaisher's Nature Printed and Newman's History. Tracing these multidirectional trajectories proffers a glimpse into inscription, arrangement, description, and preservation practices capable of sustaining lively vegetal materialities and relations within the pages of the botanical album-archive, rather than perpetuating the idea of Victorian archival stability. Ultimately, circinate readings helps us to access an overlooked model of Victorian scientific archiving committed to an non-anthropocentric ethics of archival creation that resonates with the planetary dynamism characterizing our contemporary environmental archival moment.
"The Freak Show's 'Freak Show's Missing Links'": Krao Farini and the Pleasures of Archiving Prehistory in Journal of Victorian Culture. 21.4 (2016)
Abstract: This article offers a new perspective on Victorian freakery and prehistory by reading the career of Krao Farini, the ‘Missing Link’, through lenses of queer theory and archival studies. Born in Laos with hypertrichosis, a condition that produces an abundance of body hair, Krao transformed into living proof of the ‘Missing Link’ upon migrating to London in the 1880s. I contextualize Krao’s exhibition by situating her show within contemporaneous visual, textual, and performed examples of the ‘Missing Link’. Reading Krao alongside these other ‘Missing Links’ illuminates inconsistencies in their representations of gender and sexuality that nullify firm distinctions between ‘pre’ and ‘history’. I argue that the freak show’s ‘Missing Link’ materializes rhetorical and epistemological connections between Victorian prehistory and contemporary queer historiography to provide a valuable framework for accessing queer archives otherwise buried in the historical record. Though the correlations between prehistory and queer history are not necessarily explicit, locating their similarities reveals how persistent notions of Victorian time inform contemporary queer scholarship. Presaging recent queer archival interventions, Krao’s remaining archive demonstrates how prehistory breeds alternative models of evidence that disorder the archive’s relation to time: evidence of the ‘Missing Link’ unravels the language of stability, family, and presence on which archives typically rest. Resisting the implicitly heteronormative logic of the archival document, prehistory makes possible new ways of narrating Victorian histories of freakery, imperialism, and gender and sexuality.
"Bartola and Maximo, the 'Aztec Children'" Nineteenth Century Disability: Cultures & Contexts.
Dissertation Abstract: University of California Humanities Research Institute Dissertation Grant Awardees.
**winner of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association's Emerging Scholar prize for 2020
Centered on readings of Anna Atkins’ Photographs of British Algae; Cyanotype Impressions (1843-1853), this essay works toward establishing a poetics of “eco-archiving” that braids the material turns in feminist ecocriticism and book history. Comprised of nearly one thousand prints, Atkins’ Photographs Impressions project activates an experimental cyanotype (blue print) process combining the labors of humans, plants, and their environments. Reading Anna Atkins’ Photographs alongside contemporary material ecocriticisms fleshes out environmentally sensitive documentary practices that resist the deadening, anthropocentric imperatives associated with traditional models of archiving. I chart the material-emotional history of Atkins’ Photographs, from its creation as a father-daughter project to its continuous dissemination as a series of unbound manuscripts. Not simply documenting human mastery over nature, the lifecycles of Atkins’ volumes generate lively connective tissues among texts, humans, and environmental agents to envision a set of archival practices shared by women, plant-life, and the weather. Anna Atkins’ Photographs materializes expansive ecologies of archival authorship, preservation, and stewardship to recast Victorian scientific archives as spaces for fostering ethical encounters between plants and humans.
"Disjecta Membra: the archival seriality of Cecilia Glaisher's Nature Printed (1857) in Nineteenth-Century Contexts: an Interdisciplinary Journal 40.5 (2018)
This article resists the twin time-bound narratives of Victorian archival stability and contemporary archival dynamism by unpinioning Victorian botanicals and asking: how do plants archive life? To answer this question, I look to archival reading practices generated by two overlapping botanical projects from the mid-nineteenth-century "fern-craze," Cecilia Glaisher's album Nature Printed (1857) and Edward Newman's History of British Ferns (1840-1865). When taken together, Glaisher and Newman's projects posit performances of reading that require us to remain attentive to the entwined and animate processes contributing to the developments of plants and archives; I call this "circinate reading." "Circinate" refers to the gyrating, swiveling, and uncoiling motions of fern fronds as they develop along the rachis (the steim) and through the pinna (the leaflets.) I adapt circination as a template for an expansive, speculative reading practice that moves beyond interpreting individual specimens to reconstruct an ecosystem of mid-century botanical archiving practices that illuminate the developmental patterns of archives. Tapping into the responsive relational dynamics of plant life, circinate reading invites us to braid together the parallel, intersecting, and dovetailing developmental cycles of Glaisher's Nature Printed and Newman's History. Tracing these multidirectional trajectories proffers a glimpse into inscription, arrangement, description, and preservation practices capable of sustaining lively vegetal materialities and relations within the pages of the botanical album-archive, rather than perpetuating the idea of Victorian archival stability. Ultimately, circinate readings helps us to access an overlooked model of Victorian scientific archiving committed to an non-anthropocentric ethics of archival creation that resonates with the planetary dynamism characterizing our contemporary environmental archival moment.
"The Freak Show's 'Freak Show's Missing Links'": Krao Farini and the Pleasures of Archiving Prehistory in Journal of Victorian Culture. 21.4 (2016)
Abstract: This article offers a new perspective on Victorian freakery and prehistory by reading the career of Krao Farini, the ‘Missing Link’, through lenses of queer theory and archival studies. Born in Laos with hypertrichosis, a condition that produces an abundance of body hair, Krao transformed into living proof of the ‘Missing Link’ upon migrating to London in the 1880s. I contextualize Krao’s exhibition by situating her show within contemporaneous visual, textual, and performed examples of the ‘Missing Link’. Reading Krao alongside these other ‘Missing Links’ illuminates inconsistencies in their representations of gender and sexuality that nullify firm distinctions between ‘pre’ and ‘history’. I argue that the freak show’s ‘Missing Link’ materializes rhetorical and epistemological connections between Victorian prehistory and contemporary queer historiography to provide a valuable framework for accessing queer archives otherwise buried in the historical record. Though the correlations between prehistory and queer history are not necessarily explicit, locating their similarities reveals how persistent notions of Victorian time inform contemporary queer scholarship. Presaging recent queer archival interventions, Krao’s remaining archive demonstrates how prehistory breeds alternative models of evidence that disorder the archive’s relation to time: evidence of the ‘Missing Link’ unravels the language of stability, family, and presence on which archives typically rest. Resisting the implicitly heteronormative logic of the archival document, prehistory makes possible new ways of narrating Victorian histories of freakery, imperialism, and gender and sexuality.
"Bartola and Maximo, the 'Aztec Children'" Nineteenth Century Disability: Cultures & Contexts.
Dissertation Abstract: University of California Humanities Research Institute Dissertation Grant Awardees.