Animals Among Us - Conversations in Animal Futures

Animal studies has been many infection points. We have moved and continue to move across time, place and concepts. The field has ranged from studying singular animals to the animal gaze to multispecies ecologies to race, gender, and nationalisms, and from animality to critical animal studies to the creaturely. This symposium asks participants to consider the trajectories of animal studies that bring us to the current moment and to imagine the future of the field.

Animal studies has seen many infection points. We have and continue to, move across time, place, and concepts: from singular animals and animal gaze to multispecies ecologies; from the human-animal division to questions of race, gender, and disability; from animality to critical animal studies to the creaturely; from literature, art, and philosophy to extinction, conservation, and climate change. This symposium asks participants to consider the trajectories of animal studies that bring us to the current moment and to imagine the future of the field.

Bring essential voices in the field into conversation with junior scholars and graduate students, we hope to think with animals and with each other over the course of two days. The symposium establishes a friendly, open, cross-generational conversation. It is small and light enough to be nimble, and open enough to be speculative while also adept, knowing, and caring.

The symposium establishes a friendly, open cross-generational conversation. It is small and light enough to be nimble, open enough to be speculative while also adept, knowing, and caring.

Speakers:

Susan McHugh is Professor of English at the University of New England. She is the author of Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines and coeditor of Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges, and the Arts: Animal Studies in Modern Worlds.

Kari Weil is Professor in the Philosophy Department at Wesleyan University. She has published widely on feminist theory, questions of gender in 19th and 20th century French and European literature, and, most recently, on theories and representations of non-human animals and human-animal relations.  In addition to her various essays, she is the author of Precarious Partners: Horses and their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France, (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now (Columbia UP, 2012) and Androgyny and the Denial of Difference (University Press of Virginia, 1994).

Ruth Lipschitz is Lecturer at the University of Johannesburg. She researches species, racial, and sexual differences in contemporary South African art and draws on deconstruction, queer theory, posthumanism, human-animal studies, film and media studies, psychoanalysis, and postcoloniality.

Jason Price is Interim Chair and Associate Professor of English Department, University of North Alabama. Here research and teaching fields: 20th and 21st Century British and Anglophone Literature, Postcolonialism, South African Literature, Animal Studies, Ecocriticism.

Alastair Hunt is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Portland State University. His work focuses principally on Romantic literature, political theory, and animal studies, with occasional excursions into popular culture.

This event is hosted by Humanities Institute.