Term One

16 October 2024

AHG Waterhole

For the first event in this year’s programme we’d like to invite you to the Animal History Group ‘waterhole’ for a chance to get to know fellow attendees.

It’s been fantastic to connect with so many people through our online events, and to continue to build our community, but we’ve missed having the opportunity to get to know everyone and have some more informal chats about what we are all working on. So we thought we’d run a one off event (similar to the Hangouts some of you may have previously attended), where all you have to do is sign up, come along and have a chat about animal history. Pets welcome!

Please note this will be a participatory event and depending on numbers we will likely use breakout rooms to facilitate smaller discussions.

13 November 2024

Concrete and steel for animal farming: How livestock shaped modern architecture, 1910s–1930s

Sofia Nannini, Politecnico di Torino

Since the emergence of the slaughterhouses in Cincinnati and Chicago during the nineteenth century, modern architecture has often been connected to the industrialization of animal death. Notably, the “disassembly line” of meat became a source of inspiration for the architectural implementation of the Fordist assembly line. Many pages of Mechanization Takes Command (1948) are dedicated to what architectural historian Sigfried Giedion defined as the intersection between “mechanization and death: meat”. The patents for slaughtering equipment featured in the book attested to the crucial role of the industrialized slaughterhouse in capitalist modes of production and, later, in modern architectural discourse. At the same time, the mechanization of life was a slower process, still grounded in the rural dimension of the agricultural economy.

However, the influence of zootechnics on Western modern architecture has largely been overlooked. This proposal will reflect on a few material transformations within Western animal farming practices – specifically the adoption of reinforced concrete and tubular steel – occurred in the United States, Canada, and UK between the 1910s and the 1930s. Often anticipating the global popularity of modernist aesthetics and mirroring their application in the industrial field, the structures of animal farming embraced the use of concrete and steel to face issues related to hygiene, disease control, and productivity. At a closer look, it becomes evident how the architectural and material changes in the construction of livestock housing were tightly interconnected to the animals themselves: it was their behavior which shaped the architectural design of modern farms, thus modelling layouts and fixtures around their bodies and yet reinforcing the spatial dominion of humans.

11 December 2024

Horses and Place-Making: A More-Than-Human Geography of Equine Britain

Neil Ward, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia

Perhaps more than any other animal species, the horse has shaped the world of human development for several millennia. While equestrian history has flourished over the last two decades, geographers have engaged little with the role of the horse in the evolution of places, be they towns, cities, rural landscapes or nations. Taking an historical-geographical approach, and using Britain as a case study, this paper explores the role of the horse in the more-than-human geography of a nation. It traces the role and implications of horse-based mobility for the evolution of settlement structure, urban morphology and the rural landscape. It maps the growth and various uses of horses to the point of ‘peak horse’ in the early twentieth century before considering the contemporary place of the horse in twenty-first century economy and society. It assesses the role of the horse in the formation of places within Britain and in the formation of the nation. The paper reflects on the implications of this historical and contemporary equine geography for animal geographies and animal studies. It argues for the study of animals in general in how places are made, not just by humans.

Term Two

24 January 2025

ECR Symposium

Join us on Friday 24 January for an afternoon of online animal history. We will have three sessions of diverse papers from early career researchers working in the field of animal history.

Full details and a link to the registration page are available here.

Reading Group

Back by popular demand! For the second term, we will host a series of reading groups which focus on short primary sources around a particular animal history theme. There will be 4 sessions, each lasting 90 minutes, taking place at 7pm on a Wednesday evening.

Readings will be circulated to those who have registered roughly 3 weeks prior to the session. Attendees are not expected to read anything except the selected primary sources, and don’t necessarily need to know anything about the region or the period to take part.

19 February 2025 7pm (GMT +0)

‘Penning up Penguins’, led by Natalie Lis.

19 March 2025 7pm (GMT +0)

‘The Animal History of 20^th-century Palestine’, led by Lee Raye.

16 April 2025 7pm (GMT +1)

‘The Animal History in South Africa’, led by Lee Raye.

Join us for a reading group on animal history. ‘Animal History in South Africa’, led by Lee Raye. We will be discussing 18^th century sources from the Cape of Good Hope, a 19^th century Zulu folktale on the origin of the baboon, early 20^th century sources on the South African police dog, and later 20^th century sources discussing the translocation of elephants.

A short selection of primary sources (typically about 6 pages total) will be circulated to those registered about 3 weeks prior to the session. Participants are encouraged to read through the extracts and come prepared to discuss what makes the sources important or disappointing, wonderful or horrible.

11 June 2025 7pm (GMT +1)

‘The Animals of Jahangir, 4th Mughal Emperor’, led by Lee Raye.

Interested in learning about the animal history of the Mughal Empire? Join us for a free online reading group on animal history: ‘The Animals of Jahangir, 4th Mughal Emperor’! We will be discussing some of the animal episodes from Jahangir’s autobiography, the menagerie paintings by the great Mughal artists Ustad Mansur and Abu’l Hasan, and the nerdiest notes on animals and art that the 17th century English ambassador Thomas Roe and his chaplain Edward Terry could manage.