Steven F. White &
Jill Pflugheber
Opening remarks at Microcosms: A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas exhibited in St. Lawrence University’s Richard F. Brush Art Gallery (Canton, New York).
Steven F. White
Steven F. White was educated at Williams College and received his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. White is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency and two Fulbright grants for a literary project in Chile and curricular development as a Senior Specialist in Nicaragua. When he was 22, his interest in sacred plants motivated him to visit a Cofán community in the Ecuadorian Amazon in 1977. During a transformative sabbatical year in 1993-94, he studied South American shamanism, and actively participated in the Santo Daime Church on the island of Santa Catarina in southern Brazil. He is the co-editor of Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the Amazon’s Sacred Vine (Synergetic Press, 2016), which won an Independent Publishers Book Award. His essay on Ceiba pentandra appears in The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence. He did an ecocritical study for his edition of Seven Trees Against the Dying Light by Nicaraguan poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra (Northwestern University Press, 2007), and translated the ethnobotanical poems of Esthela Calderón in The Bones of My Grandfather and Paper Beehive (Amargord, 2018 and 2022). He edited El consumo de lo que somos: muestra de poesía ecológica hispánica contemporánea (Amargord, 2014), and served as guest editor of a special issue on ecology and Latin American literature of Review: Latin American Literature and the Arts (2012). His research with Microscopy Specialist Jill Pflugheber was presented as the exhibition “Microcosms: A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas” at the Brush Art Gallery in 2020 at St. Lawrence University, where White taught Latin American literature and film for 34 years, and was a founder of the Caribbean and Latin American Studies interdisciplinary program. He is the co-author of Microcosms—Sacred Plants of the Americas (Papadakis, 2025) and currently serves on the editorial board of the journal Plant Perspectives.
Jill Pflugheber
Jill is a 1986 graduate of St. Lawrence University. She worked 17 years in biomedical research at Harvard, University of Kentucky, and University of Texas SW Medical Center, where she was able to contribute to multiple journal articles such as Regulation of PKR and IRF-1 during hepatitis C virus RNA replication. Pflugheber J, Fredericksen B, Sumpter R Jr, Wang C, Ware F, Sodora DL, Gale M Jr.Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2002 Apr 2;99(7):4650-5. doi: 10.1073/pnas.062055699. Epub 2002 Mar.
She returned to her alma mater in 2004 to take a position as the Microscopy Specialist, teaching courses in electron microscopy, confocal microscopy, and research methods in cell biology.
Each semester, the students in her confocal microscopy course participate in an “Image of the Semester” contest. Each student chooses a favorite image from their own portfolio of images, and anyone from the university community can vote for the “best” image. The university now prints each of the images used in the contest and mounts them for display on the walls of the Launders Science Library.
Jill and Steven began their collaboration after Steven had seen and admired contest images, wondering what the leaf of Banisteriopsis caapi would look like under the confocal microscope. One image led to many, and after more than three years of sample collection and imaging, the Microcosmscollection was born. Originally slated for exhibit in the university’s Richard F. Brush Art Gallery, Microcosms: A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas was slated to run from March 2, 2020-April 11, 2020 but was closed early due to Covid precautions.
Jill would like to dedicate her work on the Microcosms project to the memory of her sister Gina Wells (February 9, 1955–February 3, 2022), who was a Biology major at St. Lawrence University with a special interest in botany.
