What does it mean to think treely? Not to think of the tree as object, but to think with the tree, to let trees guide thought.
This is the question at the heart of Thinking Treely, a new exhibition at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Curated by Professor Patricia Dailey (English and Comparative Literature) and five current or recently graduate students – Anna K. Dai (PhD student, East Asian Languages and Cultures), Josephine Koch (GS student, English and Human Rights), Franziska Lee (CC '24, English and Ethnicity & Race Studies), Sophia Houghton (PhD student, English and Comparative Literature), and Jay Gao (poet and PhD student, English and Comparative Literature) – this exhibition grows out of Professor Tricia Dailey’s graduate and undergraduate Trees seminars that began in 2022. From medieval manuscripts to Japanese landscape prints to Early Modern forestry texts to the Florentine Codex to 19th-century American woodcuts to contemporary photographs and poems, this exhibition considers how deeply embedded trees are in self-definition and narratives of cultural expression, and it explores ways of thinking with tree, grove, forest, branch, stem, root, nature, soil, hedge, wood, leaf, stump, bark, graft, ring, sap – as well as accounting for forces that animate and decimate them.
