Sarah Benharrech

Sarah Benharrech is an Associate Professor of French at the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Maryland. She holds a PhD from Princeton University and is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of literature, science, and environmental thought in the 18th century.

Her research focuses on Enlightenment-era conceptualizations of plants, challenging mechanistic models by exploring analogies with social insects, corals, and collective organisms. She integrates methodologies from literary analysis, cultural studies, and the anthropology of nature to interrogate how analogies shaped early plant science.

• Specializes in: Enlightenment Studies, Gender Studies, Plant Studies, Ecocriticism
• Research explores: vegetal alterity, epistemological shifts, acculturation of botanical knowledge
• Book projects include: Marivaux et la science du caractère (2013), and the forthcoming The Dreams of Plants

Sarah Benharrech's work contributes to the growing field of the environmental humanities, rethinking human-plant relations in pre-modern scientific and literary discourses. Her guest lecture at CY Advanced Studies in 2023 highlighted the transition from viewing plants as machines to understanding them as collective, living systems.

She has no listed scientific awards in the provided text. There is no information about grants, advising, or laboratory affiliations. However, her research is deeply engaged with interdisciplinary networks in the humanities, particularly in Enlightenment and ecocritical studies.