Natania Meeker

Natania Meeker

Natania Meeker is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on the relationship between theories of materiality and the poetic or figural production of subjectivities, human and non-human. She is currently completing a co-authored book project (with Antónia Szabari) on plants and speculative fiction, tentatively entitled Radical Botany: Vegetal Speculation from Early to Late Modernity. This project has given rise to a number of articles on topics including plant horror films, gender and sexuality in botanical contexts, bees and visual art, and the eighteenth-century artist and botanical illustrator Madeleine Basseporte. She is also working on a single-authored monograph on feminine materialisms in the Enlightenment and beyond. Last year, she co-edited (with Caroline Trotot) a volume entitled Women’s Portraits of the Self: Representing Knowledge and Making Identity in Early Modernity (Arts et Savoirs 6, 2016). Her first book, Voluptuous Philosophy, was published by Fordham UP in 2006. She has served as an invited professor at the Université de Paris Est-Marne la Vallée, where she is part of the working group “L’invisibilité et la visibilité des savoirs des femmes,” and was named a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques in 2017. She is interested in the way in which vegetality functions as a kind of “in-between” or mediating ontology as well as the intersection between gendered identities and Enlightenment materialist fiction.

View the material that Natania has curated for this website here.

Image Description: A woman looks into the camera with a blurred, natural background. She has white skin, brown hair, and is wearing a top that has splashes of white, blue, black, and red.