Lara Farina
““Green Worlds: Plants and the Cultural Imaginary,” (HONR 205A) will offer a history of ideas about vegetal life as found in natural philosophy, literature, art, medicine and built environments.”
Lara Farina specializes in medieval literature and culture, sensory studies, and histories of embodiment. She is the author of Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious Writing (Palgrave) and of articles on practices of reading, sensory history, and material culture. From 2015–2020, she also edited of the award-winning journal postmedieval.
Her ongoing research focuses on the sense of touch in the Middle Ages and on imaginations (both premodern and modern) of non-human/non-normative forms of perception. Her interest in medieval ideas about the sensitivities of plants resulted in a visual exhibit on herbals and herbaria that has been displayed at academic and public libraries and the WV Botanic Garden.