LAII Greenleaf Scholar Presentation | Vegetal Bodies: Negotiating Plant and Human Relations in Late Postclassic and Early Colonial Central Mexico
Rong Lin
Thursday, October 22, 2026 | 03:00 pm
Latin American and Iberian Institute (801 Yale Blvd NE)
801 Yale Blvd NE (campus building #165)
About:
Focusing on maize, maguey, and trees, this project examines different kinds of “vegetal bodies”: representations that blur the boundaries between human and plant forms, appearing in pictorial, sculptural, and textual sources. In this project, Lin explores the visual, material, and performative practices through which vegetal bodies were imagined, made, and enacted. Drawing on sixteenth-century Nahuatl sources, codices, and plant-based objects, her project aims to highlight how plants were not passive resources but relational entities capable of action, communication, and transformation.
Rong Lin is a PhD candidate in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican Art History at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research centers on the entanglements of materiality, sensory perception, and embodied experience in Mesoamerican art. Her dissertation reconsiders how human-plant relations were made bodily through images, materials, and practices in late postclassic and early colonial Central Mexico, focusing on how these relations were produced, negotiated, and transformed during this period. Her research has been supported by Huntington Library, William L. Clements Library at University of Michigan, Greenleaf award of University of New Mexico, and Provost Visiting Scholar Award of UIC, among others.
Notes:
This event is free and open to the public.
