What am I reading in ScholarWorks? March 2025

For this month’s What Am I Reading in ScholarWorks? I want to highlight a paper that is thoroughly and wonderfully a product of Smith College: Associate Professor of Anthropology Colin Hoag’s “The Bell Jars: Smith College, Pelargonium sidoides, and Sylvia Plath's Botanical Imagination.” In the essay, the examination of the bell jar as a metaphor, and as Plath’s metaphor specifically, gets expanded through historical, ecological, anthropological, and of course, literary lenses. It’s a fascinating read, drawing upon multiple disciplines. Hoag writes, “The arcade, the glasshouse, and their prototype the bell jar have each served as technologies for making dislocated life possible, as well as figures for interpreting it.” It is this weaving together of ideas and cross-disciplinary boundaries, that is to me, not just the hallmark of a liberal arts education, but the very heart of the humanities. It’s an intellectually rich and generative way of exploring and discovering the world. Expanding our worldviews is the work of an academic institution—by celebrating the scholarship of Smith’s community each month, my hope is to make that work the joyful aim of a lifetime.

Read the essay in ScholarWorks: https://scholarworks.smith.edu/ant_facpubs/16/ 

Learn about Smith’s Sylvia Path Resources in Special Collections.
 

Smith ScholarWorks is Smith’s institutional repository of digital scholarship and research materials created and curated by faculty, students, and staff at Smith College. Browse by collections, disciplines, and authors.