About the 2025 Thinking with Plants and Fungi Conference

Conference Overview

This conference convenes scholars from across the sciences, humanities, and social sciences together with artists, culture keepers, and practitioners to explore how plants and fungi help us rethink the nature of mind and matter and humans’ relationship to the more-than-human world. The conference will consist of keynote presentations and panel discussions, and time to network and connect with peers.  

Cutting-edge scientific research is shedding light on the sophisticated ways in which plants and fungi sense, make sense of, and interact with their surroundings—research that, in many cases, resonates with wisdom that has been safeguarded by Indigenous, folk, and pagan traditions throughout the world. The widespread success of books like The Light Eaters, Braiding Sweetgrass, Entangled Life, and Finding the Mother Tree speaks to a growing public desire to understand and be inspired by nature despite—or perhaps because of—accelerating rates of biodiversity and climate change.  

Informed by contemporary science and relational, land-based wisdom, the conference asks:

How do plants and fungi challenge prevailing notions of intelligence, agency, and sentience? How have philosophical and theological traditions, past and present, grappled with vegetal and fungal life? How does close attention to plants and fungi enhance or complicate our understanding of humans’ place relative to other beings? How might plants and fungi invite us to reimagine cooperation, flourishing, and co-existence amidst ongoing ecological and social crises? 

The conference explores five interwoven themes:  

Science and Research  

Philosophy, History, and Theology 

Arts and Literature 

Decolonial, Indigenous, and Folk Studies 

Practice and Community 

Conference papers are selected by committee via a competitive call for proposals. The complete conference program is available on the program page.

About the Thinking with Plants and Fungi Initiative  

“Thinking with Plants and Fungi” at the Center for the Study of World Religions explores how inquiry into plant and fungal life illuminates the nature of mind and matter and humans’ relationship to the more-than-human world. We engage fundamental questions from academic scholarship and traditional wisdom, including: what is intelligence, where does it extend, and how? What is matter, and what does it mean to label it animate or inanimate? How can we broaden practices of care to include other forms of life? How does the study of plants enrich or complicate our understanding of humans’ place relative to other beings? 

We seek to enhance interdisciplinary cooperation between biology, ecology, and the humanities, nurturing current and future leaders in plant studies. Through scholarship and public outreach, we aim to demonstrate how nature's intelligence can inspire new models of cooperation, flourishing, and coexistence amid ongoing crises. ​To learn more about the initiative, visit the “Thinking with Plants and Fungi” website. 

About the CSWR  

Housed within Harvard Divinity School, the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) supports, focuses on, and enhances the School’s mission with respect to research, teaching, and community. It welcomes religious practitioners, policymakers, and the broader public interested in philosophy, religion, and spirituality. Initially, CSWR research and programming were dedicated to studying the world's religions in their classical and historical forms to promote understanding of the complex roles that religions play in today’s cultures, economies, and political structures.  

The CSWR serves as an incubator for novel research areas at Harvard, convening dynamic public intellectual conversations and fostering global collaboration on cutting-edge areas of research in the humanities. More recently, the Center’s focus has expanded to include programming that explores how we can transcend our normal states of knowing and perceiving to transform ourselves as individuals, groups, and societies. This has included meeting a growing demand for programming that speaks directly to the ecological and social crises of today.  

For example, in 2017, the CSWR organized a four-year series, “Matter and Spirit: Ecology and the Non-Human Turn,” engaging scholars including Eduardo Kohn, anthropologist and author of How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013); Michael Marder, philosopher, and author of many books, notably Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2013); Leah Penniman, founder of Soul Fire Farm and author of Farming While Black (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018); a dialogue between Indigenous scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions, 2013) and Richard Powers, author of The Overstory (W.W. Norton & Co., 2019); and David Abram, author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (Vintage, 2011) and The Spell of the Sensuous (Vintage 1997); and others. David Abram joined the CSWR as a yearlong scholar-in-residence from 2022-2023. In 2022, PhD candidate Natalia Schwien and then-HDS student Rachael Petersen co-founded a reading group called the “Plant Consciousness Reading Group,” which attracted a cohort from fields ranging from religious studies, psychology, and evolutionary ecology to the arts and architecture. Now entering its third year, the group explores a range of literature related to plant intelligence, sentience, and personhood. The initiative furthers inquiry by the “Plant Consciousness Reading Group” and the “Matter and Spirit” series.

Partners and Funders  

The conference is generously funded by grant support from the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation, with additional support provided by Wonderstruck and the Constellation Project. Partners include the Harvard Museum of Natural History and the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University.  

Banner image © Maya Karkalicheva.