Animal Biography: Re-framing Animal Lives

Review article The biographies of animal celebrities published by the historians John Simons and Eric Baratay aim to place animals in and of themselves at the center of academic narratives. Both excavate the lived experiences concealed behind official discourses and collective representations, notably by relying on cross-fertilization with ethological research. They unveil the ways in which information was reshaped in order to portray animal celebrities as benevolent members of human-animal communities, and thereby shed light on the mechanics of animal commodification. The close examination of a few individual animal trajectories enlightens the condition of many historical animals living under human tutelage in the 19th and early 20th century and highlights long-term historical evolutions, such as the succession of animal cultures and generations largely determined by human actions.

Animal Biography: Re-framing Animal Lives, 2018

The chapter introduces biographical research within historical, cultural and literary studies as an approach to recovering the individuality of animals. As a genre, biography depends as much on disciplinary and cultural contexts and the willingness to subscribe agency to the biographical subject as on the willingness to accept the constructedness of narratives. The chapter sketches out prior attempts to create animal biographies of individuals as well as groups of animals and presents new theoretical perspectives that promise to be fruitful in generating a view of animals as agents while at the same time problematizing the representational form of the biography. As such, the writing of animal biographies comes into view as an interdisciplinary effort that re-writes animal lives through their shared relationships with humans.

Centering Animals in Latin American History (Duke University Press, 2013), 2013

Representing animals, 2002

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Handbook of Historical Animal Studies, 2021

The paper represents the introduction to the Handbook of Historical Animal Studies, outlining the field of animal history with a focus on Topics and Themes, Methods and Approaches, and identifying Gaps and Missing Links.

Word and Text, 2021

In 'On the Animal Turn', Harriet Ritvo notes that though 'learned attention to animals is far from new', stretching indeed as far back as Aristotle's Historia Animalium, 'nevertheless, during the last several decades, animals have emerged as a more frequent focus on scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, as quantified in published books and articles, conference presentations, new societies, and new journals.' 1 Before delving into Timothy C. Baker's Writing Animals, itself part of one of a scholarly series to have emerged in this budding field (Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature), it is useful to note a few things about the circumstances attending the field's rise. As its name clearly suggests, literary animal studies is a subset within the array of subfields within so-called 'critical animal studies', which also include ecology, philosophy, ethics, history, cognition and language studies, but also, and equally importantly, social justice and activist movements, from ones focused on preservation of habitats, the humane treatment of animals and the ban on industrial and medical exploitation and cruelty to positive animal rights in freedom and dignity, to vegetarianism and veganism. Institutionally, as we learn from the accounts of Nik Taylor and Richard Twine, as well as Anthony J. Nocella II et al., critical animal studies grew out of nineteenth-century interventions like Henry Salt's Animals' Rights Considered in Relation to Moral Progress of 1894 and the post WW2 confluence between animal rights and other social justice movements as reflected in Peter Singer's foundational Animal Liberation of 1975, until they led to the foundation of the Center on Animal Liberation Affairs in 2001 and the Institute for Critical Animal Studies in 2007. The affiliated Journal for Critical Animal Studies was re-launched in the same year as a follow-up to its previous incarnation, the Animal Liberation Philosophy and