This working group brings together researchers interested in insects. We discuss the future of insect studies in the humanities and social sciences and ask methodological questions about insect research. Many existing insect studies are clustered around specific insect families and the particular interactions they have with humans both negative and positive. We are interested in what methods are promising for understanding insects within an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary context. In addition, we seek to understand knowledge systems regarding insects that lie outside the academic disciplines as traditionally construed.

The group’s core members have different temporal and geographic areas of expertise ranging from the 16th-20th centuries and covering most of the world’s continents. We have a wide range of interests from insects portrayed in art and used as commodities in the early modern period to pesticide use and concerns regarding the Anthropocene and the Plantationocene in the present day. The group is interdisciplinary in nature and we welcome curators, archivists, library professionals, scientists and many others. We intend to discuss: What is the role of insects in humanities? How do insects help us to think about non-human animal studies and multi-species relations? How do insects inspire new topics in the history of science?

Scholars studying the insect humanities represent a small but growing niche within the new turn towards non-human animal studies and multi-species concerns. Insects are a productive lens to study many current and pressing issues in the history of science. We find insects to be entities inspiring both wonder and joy.

The term ‘Insect Humanities’ was first published by Daniel Burton-Rose in 2020: “I term this body of scholarship Insect Humanities: engaging to varying degrees with social sciences such as anthropology and sociology as well as biology (particularly entomology), the primary disciplines involved are the humanistic ones of literary studies, history, philology, and religious studies.”

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Participants at Consortium activities will treat each other with respect and consideration to create a collegial, inclusive, and professional environment that is free from any form of discrimination, harassment, or retaliation.

Participants will avoid any inappropriate actions or statements based on individual characteristics such as age, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, nationality, political affiliation, ability status, educational background, or any other characteristic protected by law. Disruptive or harassing behavior of any kind will not be tolerated. Harassment includes but is not limited to inappropriate or intimidating behavior and language, unwelcome jokes or comments, unwanted touching or attention, offensive images, photography without permission, and stalking.

Participants may send reports or concerns about violations of this policy to conduct@chstm.org.

Upcoming Meetings

Monday, April 28, 2025, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm EDT

Erica Fischer will present: 'Amateurs, butterflies, and the BMNH: Amassing and skewing institutional collections of Lepidoptera' followed by a discussion

Now part of the Natural History Museum in London, the British Lepidoptera collection from the British Museum (Natural History) is the largest collection of British butterflies and moths in the world. It is also the most well-digitized collection in the United Kingdom, and the collection’s staff has been greatly influential in the lives of entomologists for decades. Museum staff members have helped to organize collectors and observers of Lepidoptera along with their observations/knowledge for the benefit of other, non-Museum professional entomologists and of the field more generally. The efforts of both staff members and non-museum entomologists (especially expert amateurs) are documented both in the written records and correspondence of the Department and in the Museum’s specimen collection. Using the BMNH as my focus, I explore the role of amateur and other ‘outside’ entomologists in museum building and entomological documentation using archival and specimen research collections dating to the period from 1881 to 1955. Methods used in this effort include archival research combined with statistical analysis of the collection database to link letters, butterfly and moth specimens, and the people who submitted this material to better understand entomology at the Museum and to provide context for how collectors shaped its growth.

Monday, May 26, 2025, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm EDT

Andrea Gaytan Cuesta and Anne Pfister - University of North Florida will present: Nocheztli & Chapulines: Insect Imaginaries and Commodification in Oaxaca, Mexico followed by a discussion.

We are an interdisciplinary team of researchers investigating insect-human relationships from anthropological and humanist perspectives. This talk traces our analysis of insects in Oaxaca, Mexico, the state with the greatest cultural, linguistic, and biological diversity in Mexico. Various insect species are found in iconic specialty foods in Oaxaca, and the cochineal bug, endemic to Oaxaca and exported from colonial New Spain to dye the world’s textiles and other products, is among the most celebrated. Mexican literature, folklore, art and music celebrate insects, creating various imaginaries surrounding insect-human relationships. For example, Mixtec cosmogonies conceive of insects as spirits of creation and depict them as connections to the land. Today, tourists flock to Oaxaca to sample chapulines and gusanos de maguey or purchase textiles and fibers dyed with natural pigments, including those extracted from cochineal bugs. We pair current ethnographic investigation and comparative literary analysis of contemporary children’s stories, Mixtec cosmogonies, and other media, to examine human-insect imaginaries in Oaxaca, past and present. We use ecocritical frameworks to explore how insects and humans create dialogues that establish a unity of spirits and diversity of bodies, reversing the asymmetrical and exploitative nature of the commodification of insects. We ask how current political economies surrounding the commodification of insects mirror and contradict the political economies of colonial New Spain, and how Indigenous imaginaries dialogue with modern patterns of commodification and exploitation. We will also describe a faculty-led multimedia project called Papernest and an ethnographic film project that has developed alongside this research.

Group Conveners

Angélica Márquez-Osuna

Angélica Márquez-Osuna is a historian of science and Latin America, specializing in agriculture, farming practices, bee biodiversity and innovation in rural landscapes. She is currently writing her book on the history of beekeeping and industrial apiculture in the Americas. She is an Assistant Professor of Latin American History in the Department of History at Loyola University-Chicago beginning in the fall of 2024. She was a 2023-2024 Postdoctoral Fellow in the Weatherhead Scholars Program at Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University in 2023. 

 

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Deirdre Moore

Deirdre Moore received her PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University in 2021 with her dissertation, 'The Heart of Red: Cochineal in Colonial Mexico and India'. Her research focuses on how complex relationships between humans, plants and animals led to the production of valued commodities in the Early Modern period with a concentration on the history of cochineal dye insects in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Deirdre's research has been supported by the American Indian Studies Graduate Student Fellowship, Newberry Library, Chicago, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies Summer Research Grant, the Tyler Fellowship, Garden and Landscape Studies Department, Dumbarton Oaks and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada among others. Her main research interests lie in the Early Modern period, exploring connections in the history and origins of international trade, economic history and the history of entomology and insect interactions with human communities. She also makes films about insects.

 

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Harriet Ritvo

Harriet Ritvo works in the fields of environmental history, the history of human-animal relations, British and British empire history, and the history of natural history. She is the author of The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (Chicago UP, 2009), The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harvard UP, 1997), The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Harvard UP, 1987), and Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History (Virginia, 2010); she is also the co-editor of Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Imperialism, Exoticism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991) and the editor of Charles Darwin’s The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). Her articles and reviews have appeared in a wide range of periodicals, including The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, Science, Daedalus, The American Scholar, Technology Review, and The New York Review of Books, as well as scholarly journals in several fields. Her current book project, The Edges of Wild, concerns wildness and domestication.

 

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