Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Full title: "What is it Like to be a Bee?" Phenomenology and Romantic Forms of Estrangement
In 1974 the philosopher Thomas Nagel occasioned a paradigm shift in phenomenology with his essay “What is it Like to be a Bat?” Nathan TeBokkel replaces “bat” with “bee” to resituate phenomenological questions, including the abiding questions of the humanities, in their entwined histories of labour, environment, agriculture, and Romantic poetry. This resituating affords a reflexive examination of phenomenology and its first-person subject, which, TeBokkel argues, is Romantic. Cultivated in fields from poetry to psychology to politics, compelled to continuously renegotiate its place in nature, this subject is a function of Romantic forms of estrangement that influenced what Marxism, existentialism, and psychoanalysis later explored as alienation. “What is it Like to be a Bee” reads this estranged subject through Romantic modes of aesthetic defamiliarization, specifically in John Keats’s great odes, in which the subject’s renegotiation of its place in nature becomes a joint artistic and agroecological endeavour. TeBokkel thus integrates his lived experience as a beekeeper, in a world reliant on insect pollination for one-third of all food crops, with Romantic poetry, which reminds us of the humanities’ vital response to economic and ecological crisis.
Dr. Nathan TeBokkel is a Banting postdoctoral fellow at Western University. He’s the past recipient of a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and a Killam Memorial Doctoral Scholarship, among other academic and agricultural awards. His first book, Whistling at the Plough, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, examines the relation between agricultural capitalism and Romanticism. His next book and the topic of his Banting project is Working Feeling, on labour history, lived experience, and Romantic poetics. TeBokkel is also training to be a master beekeeper, managing 160 hives on his family’s farm, and researching honey bee queen replacement as a technique for improving overwinter survival. His recent publications include an essay on food labels and technocratic populism in New Literary History and an essay on creative writing in The Alchemy of Stories, edited by Monika Lee and Clara Sebben.
The Ross and Marion Woodman Speaker Series in Romanticism invites intellectual exploration of this movement's powerful legacy to the Humanities and beyond. Romanticism continues to cast a long shadow on our experience, especially our present time of various crises that require Romanticism's ceaseless mental flight more than ever. This event is organized in partnership with the Department of Geography and Environment.
Recorded on 21 May 2026. Photo thumbnail image by Dudek Photography.
Full title: "What is it Like to be a Bee?" Phenomenology and Romantic Forms of Estrangement
In 1974 the philosopher Thomas Nagel occasioned a paradigm shift in phenomenology with his essay “What is it Like to be a Bat?” Nathan TeBokkel replaces “bat” with “bee” to resituate phenomenological questions, including the abiding questions of the humanities, in their entwined histories of labour, environment, agriculture, and Romantic poetry. This resituating affords a reflexive examination of phenomenology and its first-person subject, which, TeBokkel argues, is Romantic. Cultivated in fields from poetry to psychology to politics, compelled to continuously renegotiate its place in nature, this subject is a function of Romantic forms of estrangement that influenced what Marxism, existentialism, and psychoanalysis later explored as alienation. “What is it Like to be a Bee” reads this estranged subject through Romantic modes of aesthetic defamiliarization, specifically in John Keats’s great odes, in which the subject’s renegotiation of its place in nature becomes a joint artistic and agroecological endeavour. TeBokkel thus integrates his lived experience as a beekeeper, in a world reliant on insect pollination for one-third of all food crops, with Romantic poetry, which reminds us of the humanities’ vital response to economic and ecological crisis.
Dr. Nathan TeBokkel is a Banting postdoctoral fellow at Western University. He’s the past recipient of a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and a Killam Memorial Doctoral Scholarship, among other academic and agricultural awards. His first book, Whistling at the Plough, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, examines the relation between agricultural capitalism and Romanticism. His next book and the topic of his Banting project is Working Feeling, on labour history, lived experience, and Romantic poetics. TeBokkel is also training to be a master beekeeper, managing 160 hives on his family’s farm, and researching honey bee queen replacement as a technique for improving overwinter survival. His recent publications include an essay on food labels and technocratic populism in New Literary History and an essay on creative writing in The Alchemy of Stories, edited by Monika Lee and Clara Sebben.
The Ross and Marion Woodman Speaker Series in Romanticism invites intellectual exploration of this movement's powerful legacy to the Humanities and beyond. Romanticism continues to cast a long shadow on our experience, especially our present time of various crises that require Romanticism's ceaseless mental flight more than ever. This event is organized in partnership with the Department of Geography and Environment.
Recorded on 21 May 2026. Photo thumbnail image by Dudek Photography.
