New Books in Animal Studies

Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of species that ever existed are now extinct. How did we come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish forever, or as capable of pushing our planet to the verge of a sixth mass extinction? Extinction, Professor Sadiah Qureshi shows us, is a surprisingly modern concept—and a phenomenon that’s not...

Today, rats are nearly synonymous with plague, but this association is surprisingly recent. For centuries, plague devastated populations without being linked to animals. So how did the rat become the symbol of one of history's deadliest diseases? In How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Professor Christos Lynteris unravels this story by focusi...

South Asian Animal Divination: A Critical Anthology (Brill, 2025) examines the history and practice of animal omen divination in South Asia, comparing it to similar traditions in Mesopotamia and classical antiquity. It provides critical editions and translations of relevant texts, focusing on the interpretation of bird calls and behaviour. The study incorporates ornithological and natural historic...

Animals, Justice, and the Politics of Violence: Shared Struggles in Turkey (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) by Dr. Sezai Ozan Zeybek explores the intricate relationship between humans and animals in the context of modern Turkish history. From drafted animals in war, to urban stray dogs and the role of cattle in the Kurdish conflict, the cases developed in this book show how animal lives are deeply entan...

The role of a resident vet in the remote islands of the Falklands, St. Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha encompasses many wonderful complexities: caring for the world’s oldest living land animal (a 200-year-old giant tortoise, denizen of the St. Helena governor’s lawn); pursuing mystery creatures and invasive microorganisms; relocating herds of reindeer; and rescuing animals in extraordinari...

Why is cows' milk, which few nonwhite people can digest, promoted as a science-backed dietary necessity in countries where the majority of the population is lactose-intolerant? Why are gigantic new dairy farms permitted to deplete the sparse water resources of desert ecosystems? Why do thousands of U.S. dairy farmers every year give up after struggling to recoup production costs against plummeting...

How would we eat if animals had rights? A standard assumption is that our food systems would be plant-based. But maybe we should reject this assumption. Indeed, this book argues that a future non-vegan food system would be permissible on an animal rights view. It might even be desirable. In Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully (Oxford University Press, 2023), Josh Milburn que...

An authoritative history of the radical environmental movement in the United States, No Option But Sabotage explores how far activists are willing to go to defend the planet in the face of repression and the escalating climate crisis. After 9/11, the radical environmental movement was considered the number one domestic terror threat by the U.S. government. But by the end of the decade the movement...

Reading the Bible and rabbinic literature to reimagine the bonds between animals. Moving beyond debates about the ethics of animal consumption to focus on animals' intimate lives, Beth A. Berkowitz examines the contribution of religious traditions and sacred texts to contemporary conversations about animals in What Animals Teach us About Families: Kinship and Species in the Bible and Rabbinic Lit...

In this episode, we speak with Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, Katy Overstreet. Katy is coordinator for the Landscapes, Senses, and Ecological Research Cluster as well as a core-member of the Centre for Sustainable Futures – both located at the University of Copenhagen. Katy’s core fields of research include multispecies ethnography, environmental a...

Squirrels are a common sight, seemingly everywhere in wild and urban nature. Their chattering antics in city parks delight us while their raids on our backyard gardens and birdfeeders never fail to exasperate. But squirrels are more than amusing backyard entertainers, and few of us know much about them or fully appreciate their role in keeping the environment healthy. As stress on the natural worl...

A search for the meaning of one of nature's greatest riddles: why do so many creatures transform? “How many creatures walking on this earth / Have their first being in another form?” the Roman poet Ovid asked two thousand years ago. He could not have known the full extent of the truth: today, biologists estimate a stunning three-quarters of all animal species on Earth undergo some form of metamorp...

Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-century Liberal Political Writing: Political Zoologies of the French Enlightenment (Routledge, 2024) shows how our tendency to read French Enlightenment political writing from a narrow disciplinary perspective has obscured the hybrid character of political philosophy, rhetoric, and natural science in the period. As Michèle Duchet and others have sh...

Fantastic and informative talk with Sara Petrosillo of the University of Evansville about her new book, Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture (Ohio State University Press, 2023). Listen all the way to the end for a great description of the process of hunting with birds! While critical discourse about falconry metaphors in premodern literature is dominated by dep...

What if human intelligence is actually more of a liability than a gift? After all, the animal kingdom, in all its diversity, gets by just fine without it. At first glance, human history is full of remarkable feats of intelligence, yet human exceptionalism can be a double-edged sword. With our unique cognitive prowess comes severe consequences, including existential angst, violence, discrimination,...

In Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior (MIT Press, 2025), Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer reveal how scientists studying animal behavior have long projected human norms and values onto animals while seeking to understand them. When scientific studies conclude that these norms and values are natural in animals, it makes it easier to think of them as nat...

In The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 (Harvard University Press, 2024), Dr. Marcy Norton offers a dramatic new interpretation of the encounter between Europe and the Americas that reveals the crucial role of animals in the shaping of the modern world. When the men and women of the island of Guanahani first made contact with Christopher Columbus and his crew on October 12, 1492, t...

Eating Animals in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Consuming Empire, 1492-1700 (Amsterdam University Press, 2025) by Dr. Danielle Alesi examines how the perceived edibility of animals evolved during the colonization of the Americas. Early European colonizers ate a variety of animals in the Americas, motivated by factors like curiosity, starvation, and diplomacy. As settlements increased and became...

Scientists are learning more and more about how brain activity controls behavior and how neural circuits weigh alternatives and initiate actions. As we probe ever deeper into the mechanics of decision making, many conclude that agency--or free will--is an illusion. In Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Princeton UP, 2023), leading neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell presents a wealth of evide...

With nearly 1500 species, bats account for more than twenty percent of mammalian species. The most successful and most diverse group of mammals, bats come in different sizes, shapes, and colors, from the tiny bumblebee bat to the giant golden-crowned flying fox. Some bats eat fruit and nectar; others eat frogs, scorpions, or fish. Vampire bats feed on blood. Bats are the only mammals that can fly;...

For as long as cats have coexisted with humans, they have been feared, revered and respected. They appear as dynamic hunters in Palaeolithic carvings and cave paintings; were venerated as gods in ancient Egypt; and still have the power to fascinate and frighten us, as the popularity of Joe Exotic, the self-styled Tiger King, shows. How did we go from hunting, and being hunted by, cats to keeping t...

When the sun sets, things start to get interesting among wild animals. Wherever we live, whether in the city or suburbs or country, darkness conjures a hidden world of wildlife that most of us rarely glimpse. Foxes, wolves, and bears prowl while skunks, opossums, and porcupines lurk; fireflies send flashing signals to potential mates; raccoons rummage for food; owls and bats fly overhead. Wildlife...

What if wilderness is bad for wildlife? This question motivates the philosophical investigation in Wilderness, Morality, and Value (Lexington Books, 2022). Environmentalists aim to protect wilderness, and for good reasons, but wilderness entails unremittent, incalculable suffering for its non-human habitants. Given that it will become increasingly possible to augment nature in ways that ameliorate...

In 2016, Ludovic Orlando, a genetics researcher, embarked on the Pegasus Project, an ambitious endeavor to use genetics to discover the origin of the modern horse. There were plenty of theories as to who domesticated horses first–but Ludovic’s team came up with their answer: They emerged on the western Eurasian steppe around 4200 years ago. But that revelation was only the beginning of Ludovic’s w...

With breathtaking complexity and haunting beauty, the songs of whales have long fascinated scientists. Whales are the only mammals that can sing continuously for ten hours or more, changing the unique songs they sing every year. In Why Whales Sing (JHU Press, 2025), bioacoustician and cognitive scientist Eduardo Mercado transforms our understanding of these enigmatic sounds and proposes a ground...