28-29 June 2018
History Department Open Space, 8th Floor, Strand Building, KCL, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS.
Final Programme:
Prog Animal History Group Summer Conference 2018
Thursday 28 June
11:00 – Arrival and coffee
11:30 – Panel 1 – Companions and Emotions
13:00 – Lunch
14:00 – Panel 2 – Objects and Representations
15:30 – Break
16:00 – Panel 3 – Breeding and Exchange
17:00 – Drinks
17:30 – Keynote Lecture – Entangled Ecologies and Hidden Histories: The Case of the Humble Beaver Beetle. Professor Dolly Jørgensen, University of Stavanger, Norway.
19:00 – Conference Dinner
Friday 29 June
10:00 – Coffee
10:30 – Panel 4 – Health and Knowledge
12:00 – Lunch
13:00 – Panel 5 – Networks and Spaces
14:30 – Break
15:00 – Panel 6 – Encounters and Records
Thursday 28th June
Panel 1: Companions and Emotions
Michael Guida – University of Sussex
‘Kiss-me-dears’ and ‘chuckwados’: caged song-birds in the city
Rebecca Ball – University of Wolverhampton
‘She shook off words of censure as cheerfully as a dog shakes water off its coat.’ The everyday roles of animals in twenty English working-class autobiographical life histories between 1900 and 1945.
Hilda Kean – University College London
The deaths – and the lives – of domestic animals in Britain during the Second World War
Panel 2 – Objects and Representations
Alice Would – University of Bristol and University of Exeter
‘Several real heads I mounted on imitation bodies, and no one found it out’: Hybrid taxidermy and the shifting space of the Victorian exhibition
Peter Yeandle – Loughborough University
Bovril goes to war: the double consumption of the animal body in late 19th/early 20th century advertising.
Chris Manias – King’s College London
Panel 3 – Breeding and Exchange
Jens Amborg – University of Cambridge
Selective breeding and the conceptualisation of livestock animals in late eighteenth-century Britain
Charlotte Carrington-Farmer – Roger Williams University
Horses, Slaves, and Sugar: New England and the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
Keynote – Dolly Jørgensen, Professor of History at the University of Stavanger, Norway.
Entangled Ecologies and Hidden Histories: The Case of the Humble Beaver Beetle
In this talk, I will propose that animal histories need to be told that are sensitive to multi-species entanglements across scales. We need to consider how ecological relationships affect our constructed environmental knowledge. Using the 19th and 20th century history of the beaver beetle, a small and unremarkable parasite that lives on beavers, I will show that what we know about an animal (and by extension what we don’t know) is entangled with what we know about other animals and how humans have interacted with those other animals in the past. The European beaver had been brought to the threshold of extinction by hunting pressure by 1900 — probably less than 2000 individuals were remaining at the time. Because the beaver was rare when entomology as a science was taking off, the beaver’s cohabiting fauna was not well known. It was therefore not until 1869 that an insect which came to be known as the “beaver beetle” was described. The debates about this insect, where it fit into taxonomic schemes and whether or not it was a species-specific parasite were all ultimately bound up with the history of its mammalian host. Ecologies can obscure history and history can obscure ecologies.
Friday 29th June
Panel 4 – Health and Knowledge
Alex Bowmer – King’s College London
A View from the Farm: Antimicrobial Resistance Before Antibiotics c.1940-1960.
Nicolas Fortané – Paris Dauphine University
Veterinary knowledge grappling with the industrialization of livestock farming. Rise and fall of a preventive veterinary medicine in the 1970’s France.
Sarah Ehlers – Technical University of Munich
The Scientists’ Game. Sleeping Sickness and the Politics of Wildlife in German and British East Africa
Panel 5 – Networks and Spaces
Natalia Gándara-Chacana – University College London
Chasing their tails: whales, whalers and the commoditisation of the Chilean Sea. c.1780-c-1820.
Charlton W. Yingling – University of Louisville
Slave Dogs, White Power, and Atlantic Abolitionism
Megan Doole – Independent Researcher
The “oat-powered machine” and its urban infrastructure 1820-1920.
Panel 6 – Encounters and Records
Simon Pooley – Birkbeck, University of London
Nothing but the tooth: conflicting histories of conflicts over wildlife
Sarah Broadhurst – Zoological Society of London
Hatched, matched and dispatched: animal death records in the Zoological Society of London Archive
Alexander Scott – University of Wales Trinity St David
Missing Links and Nondescripts: Exhibiting Gorillas and Chimpanzees in Victorian Liverpool
AHG 