| C A R L A H U S TA K | The IPRH is delighted to welcome Dr. Carla Hustak, who joins us this fall as one of two new Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellows in the Humanities. Dr. Hustak will spend two years at Illinois conducting research on her project (see right), participating in IPRH and other campus activities, and teaching courses in the Department of History.
Carla Hustak
Project Abstract Planting Rhythms: Plant Eugenics, Organic Farming, and Experimental Gardens, 1890–1930 My project will explore the early twentieth-century cultural and scientific fascination with plant-breeding. I intend to intervene in historiographies of botany, food, and sexuality by considering how plant and human bodies were intimately interwoven. In particular, I build on my previous
Carla Hustak received her doctorate in History
research into the intersecting worlds of botany, farming,
at the University of Toronto in 2010. Her
and sex reform where similar anxieties, practices, and
research interests lie at the intersection of
scientific discourses jointly shaped eugenic movements
histories of emotions, gender, sexuality, colo-
for breeding better plant and better human bodies. This
nialism, science, and ecology. She is currently
project contributes a new narrative of the famous case of
revising her dissertation into a book manuscript
Luther Burbank’s horticultural experiments in California by
entitled, “Radical Intimacies: Affective Potential
focusing on what Burbank’s experiments tell us about sex
and the Politics of Love in the Transatlantic Sex Reform Move-
as a process managed across human and plant bodies.
ment, 1900-1930.” She argues that the sex reform movement
Moreover, my project seeks to locate Burbank’s gardens
was defined by a politics of love that constructed white middle
and their cultural popularity amid broader developments
class bodies as emotionally “civilized” in their capacity to experi-
of plant-breeding. To do so, I will consider how Burbank’s
ence sexual instincts at the higher evolutionary stage of love.
gardens can be understood in relationship to experiments
Dr. Hustak has two forthcoming publications: “Saving Civilization
at the Illinois agricultural college. My work seeks to tell
from the ‘Green-Eyed’ Monster: Emma Goldman and the Sex
a story about human-plant intimacies located within the
Reform Campaign Against Jealousy, 1900-1930” in the Journal
wider developments of agricultural colleges as sites of sex
of Transnational American Studies, and “Love and Happiness in
experimentation that decentered the ‘human’ and brought
Sex Education Pedagogies: The Russells, Beacon Hill School,
in discourses of eugenics and sex reform movements. This
and Teaching ‘Sex-Love,’ 1927-1943” in the Journal of the
project addresses an important lacuna in the histories of
History of Sexuality.
food and sexuality where Malthusianism as a question of
At the University of Illinois, she will be working on her postdoctoral project “Planting Rhythms: Plant Eugenics, Organic Farming, and Experimental Gardens, 1890-1930.” In the History Department, she will be teaching a course on the “Cultural History of Emotions in the U.S.” during the 2012 Fall Semester.
reproduction and food supply has not been pushed to an inquiry into how genetic productions of food intimately and complexly interweave plant and human bodies in processes of sex and digestion. My work cuts across the themes of race and diaspora studies, history of science/technology, Empire and colonial studies, and memory studies.
THE IPRH FACULTY FELLOWSHIP HAS ALLOWED ME TO MAKE CONNECTIONS WITH COLLEAGUES ON CAMPUS THAT I WOULD PROBABLY NOT HAVE MADE OTHERWISE. THE FELLOWS SEMINAR IS A TRUE LEARNING COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARS FROM DIFFERENT HUMANITIES DISCIPLINES ACROSS CAMPUS. Stephanie Hilger, Germanic Languages and Literatures/Comparative and World Literature, and IPRH Faculty Fellow 2011–12
4 | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | iprh.illinois.edu