Speakers - 2025 Thinking with Plants and Fungi Conference

Joela Jacobs

Associate Professor of German Studies, University of Arizona

Joela Jacobs is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona and maintains the Literary & Cultural Plant Studies Network. Her research focuses on nineteenth to twenty-first-century German literature, plant and animal studies...

Lacey Jones

PhD candidate in English and Religious Studies at Yale University; Humanities in Medicine Fellow at Yale Medical School

Lacey Jones is a PhD candidate in English and Religious Studies at Yale University and the Humanities in Medicine Fellow at Yale Medical School. Her dissertation, “Breakdown: Modernity’s Metafictions,” takes up the strange case of the word breakdown’s...

person

Jessica Lee

Writer and Author of "Dispersals"

Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, a Banff Mountain Book Award, and the RBC Taylor Prize...

Michael Marder

Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country

Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His writings span the fields of ecological theory, phenomenology, and political thought. He is the...

Rebecca Mendoza

PhD Student, Committee on the Study of Religion, Harvard University

Rebecca’s research focuses on Indigenous religious traditions of the Americas with a focus on precolonial and decolonial theory grounded in Mexico and the contemporary borderlands of Mexico and the U.S. Broadly, her scholarship centers on Indigenous...

Siôn Parkinson

Visual artist, composer, performer, writer, and researcher, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Scotland

Siôn Parkinson is a visual artist, composer, performer, and writer investigating our sensory relationship with the more-than-human world. His first book is forthcoming: Stinkhorn: How Nature’s Most Foul-Smelling Mushroom Can Change The Way We Listen...

Zoë Schlanger

Writer and Author of The Light Eaters

Zoë Schlanger is a staff writer at the Atlantic, where she covers climate change. She is the author of The Light Eaters (HarperCollins, 2024), a New York Times bestselling book about the world of plant behavior and intelligence research. Her work has...

Merlin Sheldrake

Biologist and Author of "Entangled Life"

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist, speaker, and author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures (Random House, 2020). Entangled Life, a New York Times and Sunday Times best-seller has been translated into 30...

Banu Subramaniam

Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley

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. Author of Botany of Empire...

Elizabeth Van Volkenburgh

Professor Emerita of Biology at the University of Washington

Elizabeth (Liz) Van Volkenburgh is Professor Emerita of Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle and founding member and President of the Society for Plant Signaling and Behavior. Her research focused on how leaves grow, ranging from the...