Sarah Benharrech
Associate Professor, French
Affiliate, Classics
Associate Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
3104 Jiménez Hall
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Research Expertise
18th Century
Environmental Humanities
Gender
Literature and Science
Key words: Enlightenment Studies. Science and Literature. Gender Studies. Plant Studies. Ecocriticism.
Sarah Benharrech (Ph.D., Princeton University) specializes in Enlightenment Studies, Gender Studies, Plant Studies, and Ecocriticism.
Her first book, Marivaux et la science du caractère (Oxford, UK: The Voltaire Foundation, 2013), explored moral classifications in Early Enlightenment literature in relation to 18th-century debates on taxonomy in the natural sciences.
She is at work on her second book project, tentatively entitled The Dreams of Plants, where she is examining processes of acculturation of plants knowledge in 18th-century French fiction. Drawing from anthropology and the environmental humanities, her research questions early modern and early Enlightenment cosmologies as cultural mediations of vegetal alterity.
Her investigations in the field of women in science led to the discovery of the manuscripts of Mme Dugage de Pommereul (1733-1782), an unknown woman botanist. Sarah Benharrech has published the first account of Mme Dugage’s life and work in Harvard Papers in Botany (2018) and recounted the obstacles encountered while doing archival research in an edited volume (2020) on the visibility/invisibility of women’s knowledge.
She has continued her work on women in science with a study of Clémence Lortet’s “Botanical Walks", in collaboration with botanist Marc Philippe (Lyon I, France). Her introduction and English translation of this manuscript have recently appeared in Huntia (The Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, 2020).
Sarah has two forthcoming publications: the first on Diderot’s plant blindness in regard to his zoocentric materialism in Diderot Studies; the second on the (in)dividuality of trees in a special issue of L’Esprit Créateur.
She has published several critical editions: Crébillon’s Correspondance (2002); Bachaumont’s Memoires secrets (2010); Tiphaigne de La Roche’s Questions sur l’agriculture (2019).
S. Benharrech is past President of the Society for Eighteenth-Century French Studies, an affiliate of the national American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2019-21).
S. Benharrech is a Chesapeake Project Faculty Fellow.
Publications
Vegetal Agency: The Sap Controversy In Early Eighteenth Century France Treatises on Plants and Gardening
Do plants have the power to act? Or are they inert, passive beings? This article explores two antagonistic conceptions of vegetality and highlights the representations of plants as agents of their own future in early 18th-century gardening treatises.
Author/Lead: Sarah BenharrechThis article examines how the apologetics of the abbé Noël-Antoine Pluche (1688–1761)
impacted his presentation of botanical knowledge in the ten dialogues published in the first
and second volumes of his natural history book Le Spectacle de la nature (1732–1750).
Pluche popularized a conception of the physical world where plants are reducible to inert
mechanisms, devoid of life and agency. First, I examine the various intertwinements
of science and theology in his depiction of plant anatomy, by investigating his use of
mechanical analogies, his adoption of the sap circulation hypothesis, and his application
of the pre-existence theory to account for both generation and vegetative multiplication.
I compare Pluche’s understanding of plant growth with those offered by
contemporaneous gardening treatises, demonstrating that part of Pluche’s project included
opposing the materialist and animist undertones found in these gardening treatises that
emphasized vegetal life, self-organization, and sap agency.
Publication Details:
Notes & Records. The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, The Royal Society, UK, January 2024. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2023.0033