Animal Histories: A Decade with Animals
Animal History Group International Conference
Online, Friday 11th December 2026
AHG26
Join us on Friday 11 December for a day of animal history as we celebrate 10 Years of the Animal History Group in what will be our final event as we step back and consider the future of the group.
All times are for London, UK (UTC +0), but we hope that, wherever you are based, there will be parts you will be able to join us for if not the whole event.
There is no registration fee for the conference but places are limited. Please register using the following link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/animal-histories-a-decade-with-animals-tickets-2004185916026
If circumstances change and you are no longer able to attend please do let us know as we anticipate strong interest in the event and hope to accommodate as many people as possible.
Programme
9:25am (UTC +0) Welcome
9:30am – 11am (UTC +0) Session One
The Sea, the Sand, and the Stingers: Making Sense of Jellyfishes in Australian Encounter Histories
Harrison Croft, Universität Augsburg, Germany
Night creatures: controlling urban animals in Pacific darkness
Kate Stevens, University of Waikato, New Zealand
‘Great apes on the Tween Deck’ – The journey of two orangutans from Borneo to Artis in 1909
Wessel Broekhuis, ARTIS Amsterdam Royal Zoo & Danny van Zuijlen, Independent Researcher, Netherlands
Break
11:30am – 1pm (UTC +0) Session Two
An Elephant’s Burden: Labour Histories in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 1858-1942
Anita Sivakumar, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
The ‘Federal Giraffes’ at the Museum Koenig Bonn: Animal Witnesses of German Democracy from the Colonial and Nazi Eras
André Koch, Museum Koenig Bonn, Germany
Doing A Roaring Trade: Lions and Lion Tamers in Victorian Britain
Helen Cowie, University of York, United Kingdom
Lunch
2:00pm – 3:30pm (UTC +0) Session Three
Soaring through History: Winged Snakes from Herodotus to Medieval Bestiaries
Melody Dilger, University of Leicester, United Kingdom
Contemporary archives reveal how working people opposed cat skinning in early nineteenth century London streets
Hilda Kean, Independent Researcher, United Kingdom
Women and Lions in Soviet Russia: Gender, Care, and the Negotiation of Wildness
Maria Gatti Racah, CIELS Padova, Padua, Italy
Break
4:00pm – 5:30pm (UTC +0) Session Four
A Weary Horse: Shell Shocked Equines in the First World War
Emily Oakes, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
The Trace and the Compass: Animal Iconography in Dutch Cartography of America (16th and 17th Centuries)
Rebeca Capozzi, Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Llamas, Alpacas and Guinea Pigs: Intertwined Histories among Domesticated Species in the Ancient Andes
Aleksa Alaica, University of British Columbia, Canada
5:30pm (UTC +0) – Closing Remarks
Full Programme – Abstracts and Biographies
9:30am – 11am (UTC +0): Session 1
The Sea, the Sand, and the Stingers: Making Sense of Jellyfishes in Australian Encounter Histories
Harrison Croft, Universität Augsburg, Germany
Kangaroos, koalas, banksias, and rainbow lorikeets. These are a few of Australia’s most internationally best-known native species. Described at great length by such eighteenth-century European scientists as Joseph Banks, they might generally be described as charismatic species. But Banks also came face-to-face with jellyfishes on his voyage of scientific discovery. What did he make of them? In this paper I address an important aspect of the emergent field of encounter histories by drawing attention to the more-than-human worlds in which encounters between First Nations peoples and newcomers from Europe took place at the end of the eighteenth century. This paper joins the considerable corpus of histories of the Australian beach, but takes a close look at the forgotten ones of environmental history: the jellyfishes, bluebottles, and stingers who inhabit the famed coastlines of eastern Australia.
By calling attention to the marine stingers, this paper’s updated history of late-eighteenth-century encounters on and around the Australian continent progresses an ‘uncharismatic turn’ in animal history, offering new methodologies and new insights into old histories. Here, I centre the jellyfishes and their temporalities, asking what their view of the frontier might have looked like, what the process of settler colonialism might have meant for them, and what further possibilities await at the intersection of more-than-human histories and settler colonial studies.
Biography: Harrison Croft is a Humboldt research fellow in Global Environmental History and Environmental Humanities at Universität Augsburg, Germany. His current research project is entitled “Hideous, Invasive, Forgotten: Theorising Uncharismatic Species in Environmental History”. He was awarded a PhD in History from Monash University in 2025.
Night creatures: controlling urban animals in Pacific darkness
Kate Stevens, University of Waikato, New Zealand
As darkness descended, the sensory world changed. Even as electrification started to light the streets of Pacific towns, the sounds of crabs scuttling in bedrooms or packs of dogs howling disrupted colonial narratives of modernity and control over other peoples, species and places. Histories of urban nights emphasis that darkness was a liminal time, a period frequently beyond the control of the state and thus perceived as potentially deviant and dangerous. Much of this scholarship focuses on the human social world. This paper examines the history of animals active at night in Suva, the capital of British colonial and then postcolonial Fiji, considering the ways in which concerns about mosquitoes, bats, rats, dogs, and crabs intersected with attempts to shape Fiji’s colonial society. The city was the place where diurnal regimes of labour and belonging were most visibly contested. Despite reliance on their labour, the colonial and municipal government attempted to exclude both non-Europeans and non-human species from the nighttime city. The desire to control the space-time of darkness was nevertheless met with other ways of knowing and being, revealing a range of alternative temporalities and experiences of the night.
Biography: Kate Stevens is a senior lecturer at the University of Waikato. Her research focuses on histories of cultural, environmental, and economic exchanges across the Pacific world. Current projects include an environmental and social history of Suva at night, and multispecies histories of the Pacific, focusing on shipworms and dogs.
‘Great apes on the Tween Deck’ – The journey of two orangutans from Borneo to Artis in 1909
Wessel Broekhuis, ARTIS Amsterdam Royal Zoo & Danny van Zuijlen, Independent Researcher, Netherlands
On Saturday morning 12 June 1909, Dutch expedition leader Hendrikus Albertus Lorentz travelled to Tandjong Priok, the port of Batavia (now Jakarta). An unusual task awaited him there: a number of live animals that he had brought with him from Dutch Borneo had to be loaded onto the steamship Java, due to set sail for the Netherlands that very evening. Two of these animals were two young male orangutans whose voyage by sea to ARTIS Amsterdam Royal Zoo can be traced through primary source material. Lorentz’ agenda and travel report, as well as his correspondence with zoo director Coenraad Kerbert, reveal a case study of an often-undocumented phase in which animals were in transit between their natural range and the zoo. The story of the two great apes thus offers a glimpse into a past in which animals were transported from the Dutch colonies to Amsterdam as public attractions, subjects of study or diplomatic gifts – and in which expedition leaders, civil servants, local sultanates and shipping companies formed part of the chains and networks through which European zoos expanded their animal collections. The story also forms part of a broader narrative concerning zoo animal husbandry around 1900, as well as the impact of colonial activities on wild populations and subsequent early conservation measures designed to protect species from extinction.
Biographies: Danny van Zuijlen is a researcher currently working on a book about expedition leader Hendrikus Albertus Lorentz and his expeditions to New Guinea.
Wessel Broekhuis is a historian specializing in zoo history and works for the Education, Art & Heritage department of ARTIS Amsterdam Royal Zoo. He researches the historical relationship between zoos, animal trade and the former colonies.
Break
11:30am – 1pm (UTC +0): Session 2
An Elephant’s Burden: Labour Histories in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 1858-1942
Anita Sivakumar, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
This paper begins with a story—a story of a swimming elephant named Rajan. Brought to the Andaman Islands alongside other elephants to assist with logging, Rajan had to learn how to drag felled trees and swim them out to barges offshore. Following the end of logging in the islands, he spent the remainder of his life until 2016 wandering through forests and along beaches without being put to logging work. Rajan’s story forms part of a much longer history of animals and labour in the Andaman Islands. While historical narratives have largely focused on the socio-political dimensions of the penal system, framing the Andaman and Nicobar Islands primarily through nationalism and colonial violence, this paper supplements such histories by examining how certain non-human subjects became essential to maintaining—and at times complicating—the British imperial project. It traces how elephants became integral to logging in the Andamans while exploring how knowledge about elephant bodies and their capacity for labour was produced through penal settlement records, given that these elephants were commonly classified as “fit” or “unfit” for labour. By situating these elephants and the Andamans within wider networks of colonial timber extraction across South and Southeast Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this paper also adopts a comparative approach to examine how human-elephant relations and labour practices transformed across imperial spaces. In this way, it uncovers the longer histories of mobility, extraction, and interspecies labour, reinforcing why Rajan was more than just a fascinating postcolonial discovery.
Biography: Anita Sivakumar is a DPhil student at Oxford studying the environmental histories of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Before coming to Oxford, she read the MPhil in World History at Cambridge, focusing on the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica.
The ‘Federal Giraffes’ at the Museum Koenig Bonn: Animal Witnesses of German Democracy from the Colonial and Nazi Eras
André Koch, Museum Koenig Bonn, Germany
The story of two historic giraffe taxidermies from the natural history museum of Alexander Koenig in Bonn is told: How they originated from a colonial context, how they were taxidermized by a convinced National Socialist, and how they eventually, more or less by chance, became witnesses to the re-establishment of the free democratic order in Germany after the end of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship. For it was in the atrium of the Bonn Museum, which had suffered only minor damage during the war, that the Parliamentary Council was inaugurated on 1st September 1948, which was subsequently to draw up the Basic Law as the foundation of German democracy. Before that, the big mammals set up in the atrium had to make way for the parliamentarians, including two large giraffes that the museum’s founder Alexander Koenig had brought back from his last African expedition in 1913 from what is now South Sudan – then part of the British colonial empire. As the standing giraffe was too large to be moved to the side aisle, both specimens were hidden behind a higher curtain. To this day, however, the legend persists that the standing giraffe watched the politicians over the curtain. In this way, the Museum Koenig in Bonn became the starting point for Germany’s most successful democracy. In 2024, the Federal Republic of Germany celebrated its 75th anniversary.
Biography: André Koch holds a PhD in biology and works at the Museum Koenig Bonn. In recent years, he has been researching the history of natural history museums and their colonial legacy, focusing on the provenance of preserved animals linked to the Umlauff family’s former natural history trading firm in Hamburg.
Doing A Roaring Trade: Lions and Lion Tamers in Victorian Britain
Helen Cowie, University of York, United Kingdom
On 3 January 1872 the Irish lion tamer Thomas McCarthy was killed by lions while performing at Bolton. The tragedy sent shockwaves through Victorian society and triggered anguished debates about the cause of the accident: Was McCarthy drunk when it occurred? Did he turn his back on the animals? Were the lions overworked or underfed? It also put the offending big cats in the spotlight, eliciting speculation on their different origins and characters.
Thirty-six years later, a lioness named Spitfire likewise attracted national attention after her tamer, Richard Sedgwick, was accused of abusing her. While on exhibition in Exeter, Spitfire was lying benignly in her cage when Sedgewick roused her by rattling the bars and firing a pistol. The RSPCA prosecuted Sedgewick, claiming he had mistreated his co-performer. Sedgewick, however, insisted that Spitfire was only acting: She is ‘perfectly trained’ and ‘knows her work’.
Drawing on court records, tamer interviews and newspaper reports, this paper explores the high-octane world of Victorian lion taming. Exhilarating, dangerous and often violent, lion taming conjured awe and repulsion in equal measure. It also, however, shone an unusually bright light on the human-animal relationship, offering insights into animal behaviours, character and emotions. Lion tamers, out of necessity, learned to read the body language of their animals and to recognise their individual quirks. Lions, in turn, developed a rapport with their trainers, though could also turn on them in deadly attacks. I explore these intimate relationships, charting the lives of both lion tamers and their animals.
Biography: Helen Cowie is Professor of History at the University of York. She is author of Llama (2017), Victims of Fashion: Animal Commodities in Victorian Britain (2022) and Animals in World History (2025). She is editor of A Cultural History of Birds in Nineteenth-Century Britain (forthcoming 2027).
Lunch
2:00pm – 3:30pm (UTC +0): Session 3
Soaring through History: Winged Snakes from Herodotus to Medieval Bestiaries.
Melody Dilger, University of Leicester, United Kingdom
Flying, or rather winged, snakes have appeared and reappeared throughout human history. From the ancient Egyptian goddess Wadjet, depicted as a winged snake found in Predynastic Egypt (6000-3000 BCE), to the first literary mentions of such creatures in Assyrian accounts (c. 671 BCE), to the infamous winged snakes as protectors of frankincense trees (a folktale still circulating to the present day) featured in Herodotus’ Histories.
This paper explores and traces the winged snakes, as mentioned in Books Two and Three of Herodotus’ Histories, throughout the literary tradition, focusing on their reception from the 6th century BCE to Medieval manuscripts and bestiaries. Specifically, this paper aims to explore the possible connection and development of the mythologem of the winged snake into the dragon.
My approach is two-fold. First, to examine the role of winged snakes in Herodotus’ narrative, including their origins and identifications. Second, to trace their evolution in the literary tradition, providing context and offering a comparative perspective to enhance understanding of their significance. This study assesses Herodotus’ description of the winged snakes (Hdt. 2.75 ff. and 3.107-109), while analysing the intertextuality of the mythologem throughout different time periods.
Overall, this study investigates the narrative’s evolution while contextualising and visualising the dissemination of information from antiquity up to the Medieval Period. The argument posited here suggests that earlier accounts of winged snakes, such as Herodotus’ Histories, are frequently echoed in other texts, inviting a critical consideration of how this mythologem was shared by various cultures across time.
Biography: Melody Dilger is an AHRC DLA-funded PhD candidate in Ancient History at the University of Leicester. She earned two MAs, one in Classics and one in Classical Archaeology and Assyriology, before moving to Leicester in 2026. Her current research examines the significance of customs and their transgression in Herodotus’ Histories.
Contemporary archives reveal how working people opposed cat skinning in early nineteenth century London streets
Dr Hilda Kean, Independent Researcher, United Kingdom
Using online accessible archival material, I analyse the position of cats who were often caught in order to be skinned, in various parts of London in the 1800s; this includes locating the areas in the city where skinners killed cats and traded their skins.
Although the Martin’s Act of 1822 protected certain animals, others were overlooked. Not until 1849 did a new law specifically defend cats and dogs. Yet ordinary London residents and workers publicly opposed the continuing cruelty against cats and dogs even before this Act was passed. The consideration of court and Census material can more fully emphasise cat-human relations, as can recently available maps.
Some animal geographers have noted the ways in which animals affect the societies in which they live “acknowledging the ‘co-producing’ [of] spaces”. It is now easier to identify the streets where skinners were located because of new interest in street names and their history. It is important that we use emerging evidence to develop historical understanding of the past within Animal Studies.
Being a Londoner, I have carefully considered materials and approaches to “redefine” the ways in which this animal-human presence on London’s streets nearly 200 years ago can be seen historically today. Nowadays, online material can often show C19th working-class support for stray cats that would have been overlooked by earlier C20th social historians not yet able to access what is available online in the C21st.
Biography: Hilda Kean, retired dean of Ruskin College, Oxford, is an honorary senior research associate at UCL. Her many books include Animal Rights: political & social change in Britain (1998/2000), London Stories (2004), The Great Cat and Dog Massacre (2017/2018), The Routledge Companion to Animal – Human History, edited with Philip Howell (2019/2020).
Women and Lions in Soviet Russia: Gender, Care, and the Negotiation of Wildness
Maria Gatti Racah, CIELS Padova, Padua, Italy
In Soviet Russia, the lion – the proverbial “king of beasts” – became the focus of two women’s strikingly different professional and narrative projects. Vera Chaplina (1908-1994), a Moscow Zoo keeper and children’s writer, famously raised the lioness Kinuli in her communal apartment, while Irina Bugrimova (1910-2001) became one of the Soviet circus’s leading lion trainers. Their careers developed against the backdrop of changing gender roles, which opened new possibilities for women to claim authority in occupations traditionally associated with masculine courage and strength.
Drawing on Chaplina’s animal narratives and Bugrimova’s autobiographical writings, particularly My Profession (1956), this paper examines how their accounts construct and negotiate the boundaries between humans and wild animals. Both women foreground interspecies relationships rather than presenting lions merely as objects of zoological observation. Yet these relationships unsettle established categories in different ways. Chaplina’s lioness moves through Moscow and inhabits domestic space, challenging conventional expectations of a wild predator. Bugrimova portrays training as a precarious negotiation with individual animals whose attachment, resistance, and unpredictable behaviour continually test the limits of human control. Her circus performances stage an appearance of absolute mastery that her autobiographical accounts repeatedly undermine.
Through a close reading of these narratives, the paper aims to investigate how the notion of wildness is constructed and negotiated through interspecies relationships, with particular attention to care, discipline, risk, and performance, against the backdrop of changing Soviet gender roles and approaches to animal training.
Biography: Maria Gatti Racah holds a PhD in Russian Studies from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and has held postdoctoral positions at Ca’ Foscari and Bologna. She teaches Russian language and translation at CIELS Padua. Her research explores Russophone literatures, Russian-Jewish cultural relations, émigré writing, ecocriticism, and human–nonhuman relationships.
4:00pm – 5:30pm (UTC +0): Session 4
A Weary Horse: Shell Shocked Equines in the First World War
Emily Oakes, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
Over 70,000 horses and mules were used during the First World War by soldiers in the Canadian Expeditionary Forces. Although they were essential in roles such as artillery, transport, and cavalry to support the actions of the Canadian Expeditionary Forces, the role of equines in that conflict is typically overlooked in the Canadian collective memory. Horses and mules worked alongside soldiers in the terrible environment of the Western Front and endured the same horrors that the men did. In the process of this work, soldiers formed deep interspecies bonds and working relationships with their horses and mules. In their diaries, letters, memoirs, trench newspapers, and other writings, soldiers often anthropomorphized their horses when they described the equines’ personalities and actions. One of the most fascinating ways that they anthropomorphized their equine partners was through how some soldiers described equines as being shell-shocked. These soldiers described particular equines’ behaviours and labelled them as shell-shocked. Shell-shock, a term which was understood and applied to soldiers in varying ways during the First World War, was used by soldiers to describe specific horses and mules on the Western Front despite the fact that shell-shock was never a type of diagnosis which Canadian Army Veterinary Corps officers used. This presentation will investigate the meaning of how soldiers understood shell-shocked First World War horses and mules in the Canadian Expeditionary Forces.
Biography: Emily is a Ph.D. candidate from Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research focuses on the relationships between soldiers and equines in the Canadian Expeditionary Forces during the First World War. In her spare time, she cares for and trains curly horses.
The Trace and the Compass: Animal Iconography in Dutch Cartography of America (16th and 17th Centuries)
Rebeca Capozzi, Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
This paper presents the developments of a postdoctoral research project dedicated to investigating the role of animal iconography in Dutch cartography of the New World produced between the 16th and 17th centuries. Based on the premise that Early Modern maps were not merely instruments of geographical precision, but also visual repositories of knowledge about nature, this study examines how printing workshops, engravers, and cartographers from the Low Countries — a nerve center of European engraving and publishing in the period — constructed representations of American fauna. Specifically, it investigates how these animal images (whether real, exotic, or fantastic) circulated among natural history treatises, travel accounts, and cartographic plates, shaping the European imaginary regarding overseas biodiversity. By examining the visual agency of these artifacts, this work aims to understand how Dutch cartography acted as an active space for the production, translation, and circulation of zoogeographical knowledge about the American continent prior to modern scientific specialization.
Biography: PhD and Master in History of Science and Health from Casa de Oswaldo Cruz (PPGHCS/Fiocruz), with a FAPERJ Grade 10 fellowship. Bachelor in History from PUC-SP. Currently undertaking Post-Doctoral research (FAPERJ Grade 10). Researcher at the Animal Studies Center (CEA-UFMG) and member of the LITVAA and LHACS research groups. Experienced in scientific outreach, with interests in the History of Natural History, Historical Epistemology, and Animal History.
Llamas, Alpacas and Guinea Pigs: Intertwined Histories among Domesticated Species in the Ancient Andes
Aleksa Alaica, University of British Columbia, Canada
Camelids and guinea pigs (cuy) are central to Andean cuisine and ritual practice. In this paper, we examine the variable use of camelids and guinea pigs in the complex social and political relationships of Late Moche and Transitional phases of the Andean Middle Horizon on the North Coast of Peru (650–1050 CE). We mobilize the analysis of zooarchaeological collections from the sites of Huaca Colorada and Tecapa, which contain remains of both taxa throughout monumental and elite spaces. Employing stable isotope analyses from camelid and guinea pig remains between these sites, we trace their consumption throughout the period and highlight how their variable use and management attests to the expanding long-distance trade and the intensification of agricultural practice in the region in the latter half of the Middle Horizon. The importance of these species indicates coevolutionary transformation between people, commensal and ungulate taxa, but the unique relationship that forms between both guinea pigs and camelids and humans in the Andes fundamentally transformed cuisine and political exchange. We often consider pack animals as the prime movers of political and economic change, but including an analysis of guinea pigs provides new insights to complex human-animal relationships in the Americas.
Biography: Aleksa Alaica is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at The University of British Columbia. She is an anthropological archaeologist who has worked in the Andes for over 15 years now. She examines how the lives of human and nonhuman actors co-shaped experiences in daily life and long-term practices among herders, agriculturalists, artisans, and political leaders. Her work has investigated the way that Moche ritual practices were influenced by the life histories of animals. In the last 10 years, she has contributed to and led projects that seek to deconstruct the impact of large-scale sociopolitical influences in the southern highlands and coast of Peru in the 1st millennium CE., specifically among the Nasca and Wari cultures.
