Participant Bios

Luthfi Adam is a Research Fellow at Monash University Indonesia. Formerly he was a fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. His book project, Cultivating Power: Botany, Agriculture, and Colonial Expansion in the Netherlands East Indies, 1745-1941, explores the pivotal role of botanic gardens in the expansion of colonial plantations and environmental governance.

Jens Andermann is David B. Kriser Professor in the Humanities at NYU and an editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and the book series SubAtlantic: Latin American, Caribbean, and Luso-African Ecologies (De Gruyter). Latest publications: Jardín (2023), Entranced Earth: Art, Extractivism, and the End of Landscape (2023), and as co-editor, Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics (2023).

Ahmed Ansari is an Assistant Professor in the Integrated Design and Media Program at NYU. Tandon, where he focuses on design studies and history, design in the Global South with an area focus on the Indian Subcontinent, and the politics of culture and race in technology development and design practice.

Katia Arfara’s work focus on migration, ecology, memory and the politics of representation. Her recent scholarship has appeared in Theatre Journal and TDR. She is the author of Théâtralités contemporaines, the co-editor of lntermedial Performance and Politics in the Public Sphere and co-leads the Elements Pod in the NYUAD’s Anthropocene Research Kitchen.

Elaine Ayers is a Lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University, where she works on the entangled colonial histories of collecting, natural history, and violence in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her book projects focus on the history of colonial botany and moss as a cultural and scientific artifact.

Yota Batsaki is the Executive Director of Dumbarton Oaks, a research institute of Harvard University in Washington, DC. She also directs the Plant Humanities Initiative, which comprises scholarly programs and an open access digital platform dedicated to the study of plant-human relationships. Her recent research has appeared in Environmental Humanities, Environmental History, and Critical Inquiry.

Tega Brain is an Industry Associate Professor of Integrated Design Media at NYU Tandon and an Australian-born artist whose work addresses issues of ecology, data, automation, and infrastructure. Her first book is Code as Creative Medium, co-authored with Golan Levin and published with MIT Press.

Xan Sarah Chacko is a Lecturer in Science, Technology, and Society at Brown University. She is co-editor of Invisible Labour in Modern Science (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) and the Special Issue: Domestication of War in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience, Vol. 9 No. 1 (2023). Her current book project, The Last Seed: Botanic Futures in Colonial Legacies, traces the history and practices of the seed bank.

Dipti Khera is an Associate Professor, Department of Art History and Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. Trained in architecture, museum anthropology, and art history, she studies histories of early modern and colonial South Asia. While specializing in paintings, books, scrolls, and maps, emerging from northern and western India, she has published on the crafting of colonial taste by nineteenth-century silversmiths and vernacular travel artifacts that reveal the archival borders and blind spots in endeavors of globalizing disciplines. Her collaborative work with Rajasthan's museums and libraries has led to international exhibitions and new conservation and digital projects.

Yifei Li is an Assistant Professor of environmental studies at NYU Shanghai and a global network assistant professor at NYU. He is the lead author of China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet (Polity 2021). His research has been featured on NPR, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, and other media. 

Sheetal Majithia’s work focus on ecocriticism, comparative postcolonial studies, feminist and affect studies in South Asia, particularly how secular modernity and melodrama in India express progress. She taught at UPenn, Hampshire College, and NYUAD before Juilliard. Majithia’s research appears in SAMAR, Modern Drama, and South Asian Review and was supported by the Mellon Foundation and AIIS.

Lucas Mertehikian is the Director of the Humanities Institute at the New York Botanical Garden, where he builds and coordinates academic and public-facing programming at the intersection of the humanities, the arts, and the plant world. Before joining NYBG, he was a postdoctoral fellow in Plant Humanities at Dumbarton Oaks. He received his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. 

Romita Ray is Associate Professor of Art History at Syracuse University. She has published widely on the art and architecture of the British empire in India and is currently working on a book manuscript on the visual cultures of tea in colonial and modern India.

Radhika Subramaniam is Associate Professor of Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design/The New School. Through her interdisciplinary practice as curator and writer, she explores the poetics and politics of crises and surprises, particularly in cities and crowds, walking and other mobilities, art, and human-nonhuman relationships.

Alice Y. Tseng is Professor of Art and Architecture at Boston University. A specialist of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture, art, and visual culture of Japan, she is the author of The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan: Architecture and the Art of the Nation (2008) and Modern Kyoto: Building for Ceremony and Commemoration, 1868-1940 (2018).