New Books in Animal Studies

Artist Jan Harrison's work explores the connections between human and animal psyches and takes the form of painting, pastel, sculpture, and performance. Jan's essay in the current (January 2011) issue of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, called "Singing in Animal Tongues: An Inner Journey", describes the origins and scope of Jan's work, including her ability to speak and sing in "Animal Tongu...

Through nine emotionally vivid stories, all narrated from animal perspectives, Talia Lakshmi Kolluri’s debut collection explores themes of environmentalism, conservation, identity, belonging, loss, and family with resounding heart and deep tenderness. In Kolluri’s pages, a faithful hound mourns the loss of the endangered rhino he swore to protect. Vultures seek meaning as they attend to the antelo...

In What It All Means: Semantics for (Almost) Everything (MIT Press, 2022), Philippe Schlenker takes readers on tour of meaning, from the animal kingdom to human culture, arguing that semantics should be taken to have a wide range of applications. He takes on bird song and primate calls, classical music and sign language, predicate logic and scalar implicatures. Throughout, he demonstrates the succ...

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...

Irish vegan studies are poised for increasing relevance as climate change threatens the legitimacy and longevity of animal agriculture and widespread health problems related to animal product consumption disrupt long held nutritional ideologies. Already a top producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union, Ireland has committed to expanding animal agriculture despite impending crisis....

In Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft and the Sciences of the Sea (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Samantha Muka, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Stevens Institute of Technology, dives into the unexpected world of tank crafting. Throughout the book, Muka tells the stories behind the development of various kinds of aquariums, such as photography tanks and reef tanks. She...

The National Institute of Health recently announced its plan to retire the fifty remaining chimpanzees held in national research facilities and place them in sanctuaries. This significant decision comes after a lengthy process of examination and debate about the ethics of animal research. For decades, proponents of such research have argued that the discoveries and benefits for humans far outweigh...

For decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories—such as religion, science, and art—has collapsed under the weight of postmodern critiques, calling into question the possibility of progress and even the value of knowledge. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm aims to radicalize and move beyond thes...

Annika Culver’s Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology (Bloomsbury Academic 2022) uses a previously unavailable archive of photographs as the jumping off point to follow the careers of Japanese ornithologists in the transwar generation as they navigated the complexities of their swiftly changing political circumstances. Japan’s Empire of Birds brings out th...

Ayelet Zohar’s The Curious Case of the Camel in Modern Japan: (De)Colonialism, Orientalism, and Imagining Asia (Brill, 2022) traces the use of camels in the visual vocabulary of Japan’s definition of itself in the world―especially vis-à-vis “Asia―from the Edo period to the present.” In other words, Zohar uses representations of camels as a lens to view the ways in which Japan has both attempted to...

Margret Grebowicz's Rescue Me: On Dogs and Their Humans (U Minnesota Press, 2022) is a little book about the oldest relationship we humans have cultivated with another large animal—in something like the original interspecies space, as old or older than any other practice that might be called human. But it’s also about the role of this relationship in the attrition of life—especially social life—in...

A short guidebook to understanding and discussing privilege among vegans and vegan organizations in the wake of #metoo, including how to establish accountability while honoring dignity and ways to communicate effectively. In The Vegan Matrix: Understanding and Discussing Privilege Among Vegans to Build a More Inclusive and Empowered Movement (Lantern Publishing & Media, 2020), psychologist, longti...

How should humans respond to our ongoing human-made climate catastrophe? To answer that question, Recall this Book turned to prize-winning climate reporter Elizabeth Kolbert, who visited Brandeis this Fall. The topic was Under a White Sky, her recent book that documents the responses to the climate crisis ranging from a form of climate engineering that shoots reflective particles into the air to c...

In this episode, I talk to Dr. Laura Jean McKay about her award-winning novel The Animals in that Country (Scribe US, 2020). Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She’s never been good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in an outback wildlif...

Experimentation on animals—particularly humans—is often assumed to be a uniquely modern phenomenon. But the ideas and attitudes that encourage biological and medical scientists to experiment on living creatures date from the earliest expressions of Western thought. In Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Aristotle to CRISPR (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022) (Johns Hopkins UP), Anita Guerrini looks a...

Today I talked to Alan Shuback about his book Hollywood at the Races: Film's Love Affair with the Turf (UP of Kentucky, 2019) A love of the slapstick film duo Laurel and Hardy led nine-year-old Alan Shuback into a chance encounter with thoroughbred horse racing in 1957. Racing soon also became a passion, and he never abandoned either love, making a career out of the latter as a transatlantic racin...

The natural world teems with remarkable conversations, many beyond human hearing range. Scientists are using groundbreaking digital technologies to uncover these astonishing sounds, revealing vibrant communication among our fellow creatures across the Tree of Life. At once meditative and scientific, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plant...

In this time of extinctions, the humble snail rarely gets a mention. And yet snails are disappearing faster than any other species. In A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions (MIT Press, 2022), Thom van Dooren offers a collection of snail stories from Hawai'i--once home to more than 750 species of land snails, almost two-thirds of which are now gone. Following snail trails thro...

In this episode of High Theory, Leigh Claire La Berge talks about red cats: communist cats, revolutionary tigers, radical felines of all stripes. The red cat is a provocation, and an invitation to think differently about economic history. Leigh Claire continues our spooky theory of cat concepts for Halloween 2022. Her book Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary will be published by Duke University Pres...

The Renaissance is celebrated for the belief that individuals could fashion themselves to greatness, but there is a dark undercurrent to this fêted era of history. The same men and women who offered profound advancements in European understanding of the human condition—and laid the foundations of the Scientific Revolution—were also obsessed with controlling that condition and the wider natural wor...

Saronik tells Kim about Alice Walker’s book Anything We Love Can Be Saved, where she talks about her many cats over the years, and how they represented her connection with the cosmos. Image: “Rescued from the rough streets of Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Princess Marmalade earned her PhD in Meowological Studies in 2019, with an advanced certificate in acritical napping.” Learn more about your ad cho...

Saronik talks with Kim about Jacques Derrida’s cat. Derrida writes about his cat, who makes him rather anxious, in “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 369-418. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1344276 Image: “Beatrix or Bea or BeaBea is a tiny cat living her tiny cat life.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/...

In part one of our Halloween Special on Cats, Kim talks with John Guilliory about Montaigne’s essay “An Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Montaigne asks us: “When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?” John Guillory is a professor of English at New York University. He is a scholar of Renaissance literature, who is known for his work on why we rea...

With this multispecies study of animals as instrumentalities of the colonial state in Nigeria, Saheed Aderinto argues that animals, like humans, were colonial subjects in Africa. Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria (Ohio UP, 2022) in Africa broadens the historiography of animal studies by putting a diverse array of species (dogs, horses, livest...

Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan, 1818 to Present (Oxford UP, 2021) focuses on the iteration of the trope of ‘the monstrous vegan’ across 200 years of Anglophone literature. Explicating, through such monsters, veganism’s relation to utopian longing and challenge to the conceptual category of the ‘human’, the book explores ways in which ethical identities can be written, represented, and trans...