Dr. Saskia Cornes is an Assistant Professor of the Practice at the Franklin Humanities Institute, and Program Director at the Duke Campus Farm. Her teaching and research work together to rethink our relationship to food, and to the land and people that grow it. In courses such as “Environment in Literature, Law and Science,” “Nature Culture Gender” and “Food Farming and Feminism,” she combines academic expertise in the environmental humanities with experiential pedagogies in food studies and practical experience in sustainable agriculture.
An Renaissance scholar by training, Cornes holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where she focused on the culture of agriculture in 17th century England. Her most recent work appears in Milton Studies. A farmer by vocation, she learned through a range of apprenticeships on urban and rural farms, and through post-graduate study in organic agriculture at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz. Through the Bacca fellowship, she hopes to find new ways to bring place-based embodied learning to on-line classrooms during COVID and beyond, and to make the Duke Campus Farm a more useful and accessible teaching tool for faculty across disciplines.
