Taxonomy is a fraught word in literary studies. As a regime of classification descended from the Euro-American scientific tradition, taxonomy encourages the organization of life on earth based on hard distinctions between groups. This practice often endorses essentialist paradigms that scholars in literary studies typically eschew—and for good reason. Taxonomic modes of thinking have been allied with racial, medical, and sexual ideologies that discipline the categories of race, gender, and desire.

But despite these tensions, this panel suggests that taxonomical science and literary studies are linked. Taxonomy has greatly influenced the definitions of family, species, and community that inform the growing fields of ecocriticism, animal studies, plant humanities, and more. Conversely, taxonomists engage in acts of subjective interpretation and meaning-making that we associate with humanistic inquiry. Scientists tell stories when they classify organisms into webs of relations—stories about origins, affinities, and divisions. This is why “biodiversity classifications have an innately epistemic power over us,” Robert Montoya explains in Power of Position: Classification and the Biodiversity Sciences (2022).

Literary scholars can interrogate that epistemic power by tracking the appearance of, or resistance to, taxonomic thinking in the texts we study. Though landmark studies such as Susan Scotti Parrish’s American Curiosity (2006), Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots (2009), and Monique Allewaert’s Ariel’s Ecology (2013) have hinted at the relationship between taxonomy and literature, the ecological, social, and political implications of this relationship remain understudied. This panel aims to 1) understand how the systematic organization of life on earth influences our creative practices; and 2) identify opportunities for literary producers and critics to develop alternative theories of biological kinship that could mobilize action at this moment in planetary history.

The four panelists will be limited to 12 minutes to ensure time for a closing Q&A with the audience. Their papers represent a range of perspectives from new and senior scholars at institutions in the U.S., Canada, England, and South Korea, working on American, Canadian, and Australian literature.

First, Sarah Bezan will present “The Rekindling: A New Taxonomy of Species Survival,” a response to current initiatives in bioengineering to revive extinct species like the mammoth as genetic hybrids. For Bezan, these experiments raise challenging questions about the ethics of naming and caring for genetically altered or “rekindled” species. Representations of these revived, hybridized species in novels Extinction by Douglas Preston (2024) and Fauna by Donna Mazza (2020) expose the limits of extant taxonomic models.

Next, Emma Ferrett also demonstrates that speculative fiction is a productive site for challenging existing taxonomic structures, though she turns our attention to taxonomy’s imperialist implications. In “A Weed by Any Other Name: André Alexis’s Botanical Nomenclatures,” Ferrett draws on the work of Skwxwú7mesh ethnobotanist Leigh Joseph (2023) to theorize an anti-colonial system of plant taxonomy in Canadian author André Alexis novel, Days by Moonlight (2019). Importantly, Alexis’ system acknowledges the power of plants to resist being conceptualized as stable objects of human manipulation and instrumentation.

Christina Katopodis’ paper, “Unfurling Taxonomies: Margaret Fuller’s Manifold Responses to Science in ‘Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,’” addresses how taxonomic modes of thinking have constrained ideas of gender. Katopodis argues that Fuller’s short story, featuring a female magnolia tree who becomes entwined with a community of male pollinators and plants, expresses Fuller’s theory of gender fluidity. Written at a moment when new discourse in evolutionary science was hardening the categories of man and woman, Fuller finds confirmation in the plant world that gender cannot be taxonomized.

Having considered critiques of taxonomy in novel and short story forms, the panel’s final paper highlights the unique affordances of the poetic form for redefining species and imagining new species relations. Oh Ye Sul’s paper, “The Flickering Affinities in Elizabeth Bishop’s Taxidermal Poems,” examines how the twentieth-century poet transformed the American fixation with the taxonomic science of skins into a critique of race, gender, and class. In Bishop’s poetry, Oh identifies moments of affinity between taxidermized artifacts and their viewers that destabilize the edge between the human and the more-than-human.

With their unique explorations into literary representations of the science of classification, these four papers raise timely questions about individuality, community, and relationality that tie into the theme of MLA’s 2026 convention, “Families of Resemblance.” Through the panelists' presentations and the Q&A, attendees will be invited to see the relationship between literature and science in a new light, and to consider the continued importance of literary expression to contemporary ecological and social crises.