Daisy Reid earned her PhD in comparative literature from the University of Southern California in 2025, where she was the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute PhD Dissertation Fellow. Her current book project, “On Vegetables and Vermin: The Politics of Insect-Plant Encounters from the Early Modern to the Anthropocene,” explores how ecological interactions between plants and insects — which she examines in their materiality, as well as their representations in text and visual culture — have shaped the ​representation and regulation of human bodily difference in Europe and its imperial worlds since the 16th century. She is also the co-author (with Natania Meeker) of “The Vegetal History of Sexuality,” a book that explores the role of plants in the historical invention of sexuality as well as its present-day articulations of power, and that is currently under review. In Fall 2026, Reid is teaching a 4000-level class on early modern English literature entitled “Wild Bodies: Race, Gender, and Nature,” and in Spring 2027 she is teaching the 3000-level class “Reading Between Worlds: An Introduction to Comparative Literary Studies.”  Her peer-reviewed work has appeared in Green Letters, L’Esprit Créateur, H-Net and Victorian Literature and Culture. Reid holds an MA in comparative literature from the University of Amsterdam and a BA in French and Italian from University College London.