What does Oak Spring mean when we say we host 'researchers'? All sorts of projects are encompassed by this title! Listen to this episode to learn about two Oak Spring researchers, Kathleen (Kat) Gutierrez and Lauren Cannady. Their projects are inspired by and utilize scholarly literature, oral histories as well as everyday conversations, and of course, the Oak Spring Library collection. Kat shares about her research on the field of study of botany in the Philipines, and how botany there has been impacted by colonial influences and vernacular culture. Lauren shares about her research on black locust, and how it was shaped by her time at Oak Spring.
Kathleen (Kat) C Gutierrez is interested in the politcs of botanical life and plant worldmaking in modern histories of the Philippines and Southeast Asia. Her first book, titled Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines (Duke University Press, March 2025), expands the "vernacular" in the history of colonial botany and examines practical and epistemological tensions in the Philippines during the science's internationalist acceleration.
Her next project, one drawing on oral histories tentatively titled A World in a Plant, examines five plant species (e.g. the Tricyrtis imeldae, named after former First Lady Imelda Marcos) as lenses into the plant sciences in the Cold War Philippines and the neighboring decolonized states of Southeast Asia. She builds on literature that has prioritized foreign policy, dictatorship, party politics, and civil unrest to contend that plants—and the scientists behind their study—were also instrumental to regional decolonization and notions of a Southeast Asian science.
Lauren R. Cannady is a scholar working at the intersections of art and architectural history, intellectual history, and the environmental humanities. Her research and teaching explore artistic production as the material evidence of intellectual trends in early modern Europe and colonial North America. She is co-editor of Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks, which appeared in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series in 2021, and her current research project is a book manuscript on early modern taxonomies of knowledge and the ordering of the natural world through patterned gardens and vernacular botanicals. Her research has been supported by the Huntington Library, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, the Clark Art Institute, and the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte. She holds a PhD in Art History from New York University.
Host: Chris Stafford
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