The intertwined histories of human settlement and plants amid cultural and climatic change serve as the point of orientation in the new, eclectic essay collection Seeds of Diaspora.Its works follow seeds as they bear witness to migration, resilience, and transformation. Five contributors from this collection will discuss their investigations, which consider dramatic, even if subtle, changes. The conversation will range from postwar landscapes reclaimed by plant life to cultural landscapes overwritten by city planners; seeds in glacial ice to those carried along routes of labor and exile; and trees appropriated as constituents of fictive homelands to plants as sentient beings. The contributors recognize seeds both as biological and analogical subjects, and ask how we might reconceive the relationships between human and more-than-human.
About the Speakers
Lucas Mertehikian is the author of Vidas en tránsito (2025) and co-editor of Imagining a New Natural History (2026) and Unpredictable Gardens (2027). He teaches Landscape Studies at Pratt Institute and is a researcher at the New York Botanical Garden.
Naeem Mohaiemen (Society of Fellows 2020-21; SOF/Heyman Governing Board Member) explores forms of utopia-dystopia in South Asia after 1945, spanning milestones, collisions, and disasters. He is co-editor with Eszter Szakacs of Solidarity Must Be Defended (2023) and author of Bengal Photography’s Reality Quest [in Bengali] (2025), Baksho Rohoshyo (2023), Midnight’s Third Child (2023) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (2014). He is department chair and associate professor in the Visual Arts Department, School of the Arts, Columbia University.
Dorothy M. Peteet is a paleoecologist at NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. She takes sediment cores to discover and analyze fossil seeds found in bogs, fens, marshes, and lakes along with pollen in order to understand how vegetation has changed through time, especially since the last glaciation.
Wendy S. Walters is a writer and associate professor of nonfiction in the Writing Program of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. She has received fellowships from Creative Capital, NYFA, the Ford Foundation, The Architectural League, Mass MoCA, Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Smithsonian Institute. She will be a Heyman Fellow for the 2026-27 academic year.
Raised and schooled in New York City, Lynnette Widder (Heyman Fellow 2025-26) has taught and practiced architecture in the US, Canada and Europe. She is Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University and author of Year Zero to Economic Miracle: Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf in Postwar West German Building Culture (gta, 2022). Her recent work has appeared in New German Critique, Oxonian Review, Urban Omnibus, Dimensions, and Materia.
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