Antonia Szabari

I am a scholar of early modern French and European culture. My first book, Less Rightly Said: Scandals and Readers in Sixteenth Century France (Stanford, 2010) traces the rise of a political genre in the literature of vituperation during the religious wars of early modern France. I focus on the function rather than the form of satire to show that insulting humor was a tool for vying for the power in the hands of various social groups. This project was supported with a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard.

My second book “Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction from Early to Late Modernity” (Fordham, 2019), co-authored with Natania Meeker, is study of a tradition of speculative botany through literary and popular scientific texts, cinema, and art. The book explores especially the gains feminism, queer art and advocacy, and postumanist new materialist thought is to make from the speculative experiment of seeing ourselves as vegetal. Radical Botany received the 2019 Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize.

I have recently completed a third book “Agents without Empire: Mobility and Race-Making in Sixteenth Century France” (Fordham, 2024). The book argues that before the onset of French colonialism, it was in perceptions of the Ottoman Empire where modern, postmedieval categories of race were first cast in early modern France. Here I examine old materialisms whose explorations beyond the boundaries of the human often resulted in race making. This project was supported by a USC Early Modern Studies Institute Fellowship. Before writing the book, in 2012, I co-curated the exhibition “French Travelers to the East” with Catherine Hess at the Huntington Art Collections.