Christopher started following the work of Gina Rivera, Harvard University, Music.
Christopher started following the work of 3 people.
Christopher added a position.
Post-Doc, McNeil Center for Early American Studies
University of Toronto, History
Barra Postdoctoral Fellow
Thesis Title: Plants and Peoples: French and Indigenous Botanical Knowledge in colonial North America, 1600 - 1760
About
The oldest standing tree in Paris, a Black Locust planted near Notre Dame Cathedral in 1604, first took root in North American soils. By 1700 many of the plants that grew in the Royal Gardens in Paris – the Purple Pitcher-Plant and the Dwarf Lily of Acadia among them – shared the same American origin and the same history of maritime transport in the commercial and scientific networks of the Atlantic World. Leaves and stems, flowers and roots, these plants became the raw materials with which enlightenment botany was articulated in the weekly meetings of the Académie Royale des Sciences and at the botanical demonstrations at the Royal Garden. Yet as these plants took root in new soils and regularly appeared in scientific texts, they also remained living connections to networks of ecological and cultural exchange in colonial American borderlands.
My current research analyzes the circulation of plants and botanical knowledges between American indigenous communities and French colonists, missionaries and naturalists throughout colonial French North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, tracing geographies of exchange that challenge the easy identification of centers and peripheries in Atlantic scientific networks. “Plants and Peoples” develops two closely related arguments. First, I argue that French encounters with American environments and Native cultures were inseparable. Jesuit missionaries, for example, named both a plant and a native culture “wild rice,” conflating descriptions of local ecologies and morphological features of the Great Lakes plant with accounts of indigenous cultural and moral attributes. Second, “Plants and Peoples” also analyzes the process by which the Paris-based Académie Royale des Sciences expanded its reach into North America and argues that French colonial naturalists such as Michel Sarrazin of Québec and Jean Prat of New Orleans became cultural brokers as much as botanists. My research therefore presents both a new understanding of the history of early modern and enlightenment botany and a lens through which to revisit and enrich familiar histories of cultural exchange in colonial North America.
I am currently revising my doctoral research as a postdoctoral fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. I will be joining the Department of History at Northeastern University in Fall 2013 as an Assistant Professor of Atlantic History.
