凯瑟琳·伯恩斯

Hixon-Riggs Early Career Fellow in Science and Technology Studies

My research and teaching focus on the intersections of the environmental humanities and transatlantic literature from the mid-nineteenth century to present, with emphases in 科学 and visual/media studies. 我现在的图书计划， Vegetal Forms: How Plants Cultivate Life in Literature and Science, combines literary and cultural analyses to show how the language of plants circulates in literature, 科学, and art to produce biological understandings of life and the human. By focusing on sites where scientific research and systems of plant cultivation converge—plantations, 温室, seedbanks, and gardens—my research demonstrates how regimes of plant domestication naturalize racialized and gendered hierarchies of life.

Whether I am teaching an introduction to 科学 in literature or a survey of the environmental humanities, my courses propel students to interrogate the ways in which power and difference manifest in cultural narratives, informing everything from literature to environmental racism to their own lived experiences. My current Harvey Mudd course on “Environmental Crisis in Science and Literature” asks students to consider what happens when something is called a “crisis”? What kinds of storytelling or futurities does it enable or foreclose? 学生 are challenged to investigate the role of storytelling in 科学 as we explore how art and literature can help us to imagine more just futures. 学生 in my courses might encounter texts spanning from Mary Shelley’s 《太阳2注册平台》 （1818）到Nnedi Okorafor的 环礁湖 (2014) to IPCC climate reports, as we delve into the expansive power of language to shape our core beliefs and worldviews.

我的跨学科, vertically integrated projects embolden students to rethink traditional scientific issues like sustainability or ozone depletion as narrative-driven phenomena subject to the critical tools of the humanities. Alongside Duke faculty in the 科学s and social 科学s, I co-taught three environmental courses in Duke’s Bass Connections, a program that brings together teams of under毕业生, 毕业生, and faculty to collaborate across departments on yearlong research topics. 在这一年中, students learned to approach environmental issues—water quality, 臭氧层空洞, and geoengineering—from a holistic perspective. 我带来了这个承诺 发掘杜克森林, a multidisciplinary working group I helped co-found with scientists, which examined how Duke Forest’s historical plantation ecology inflects the production of scientific knowledge. I am excited to bring this crossdiciplinary spirit to my work as a Hixon-Riggs Early Career Fellow in Science and Technology Studies.

My research has been supported by grants and fellowships from Duke University, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Council of Learned Societies. I received my PhD in English at Duke University.