Working Across Disciplines on Animal History

Animal History Group Conference in partnership with the FIELD Project

Monday 11 and Tuesday 12 September 2023

University of Lincoln and Online

We are delighted to announce the programme for our Summer Conference which this year is a special partnership event with the FIELD team, celebrating the conclusion of their five-year research project. FIELD is a Wellcome Trust funded project which has brought together historians, social scientists, economists and epidemiologists to investigate persisting endemic livestock disease.

Taking the interdisciplinary approach of the FIELD project as inspiration, the theme for this year’s conference is ‘Working Across Disciplines on Animal History’. 

The event will be hosted at the University of Lincoln, with live-streaming enabling participation online for attendees who cannot or do not wish to travel to the event in person. 

Day One: September 11^th 2023 

10:00-10:30 Registration and Coffee

10:30-12:00 Panel 1

Bird Boxes and Sparrow Traps: The Technological Regulation of Avian Life in the United States
Matthew Holmes, University of Stavanger

‘A Superior Race’: How Macaques Became Botanical Collectors in EJH Corner’s Singapore
Nathan Smith, National Museum of Wales

Connecting Farm Animals to Human Health in Leprosy Settlements in Colonial Nigeria, 1926-1940
Susan Iseyen, Princeton University (did not attend).

12:00-13:00 Lunch

13:00-14:30 Panel 2

The introduction of a “Dracula from the deeps”: how a fish became re-imagined as an aquatic invader and subjected to an elaborate eradication programme. 
Vincent Bijman, Maastricht University

No strings attached – the changing fortunes of the red kite in the Anthropocene
Virginia Thomas, University of Exeter

Bones and Bearward Diaries
Liam Lewis and Hannah O’Regan, Box Office Bears AHRC Project

14:30-15:00 Break

15:00-16:30 Panel 3

Cattle and sheep meet artists on the FIELD
FIELD Project

The methodology of George Stubbs and its relevance to a contemporary Art & Science investigation
Liz Sherratt, University of Lincoln

Dogma versus data: challenging the mythologies of pedigree dog breeding
Alison Skipper, Royal Veterinary College

17:00-18:00 Keynote

(Re)inventing the Interdisciplinary Wheel? Environmental collaboration in past and present
Dr Angela Cassidy, University of Exeter

19:00 Conference Dinner

Day Two: September 12^th 2023

10:15-10:45 Arrival and Coffee

10:45-12:15 Panel 4

‘Karl Marx, Animal Liberationist? A Challenge to Animal Studies’
Billy Godfrey, Loughborough University

Still Alive: Nonhuman Animals in the Art of Giovanni da Udine
Esme Garlake, University College London

Arts-based methods and animal history: the case of Pavlov’s dogs
Matthew Adams, University of Brighton

12:15-13:15 Lunch

13:15-14:45 Panel 5

One cow leads to another
Sue Bradley, Newcastle University

Horse power to Horsepower: animal absences in Birmingham’s industrial collections
Felicity McWilliams, Birmingham Museums Trust

Teaching Citizen Bird: Animal History, Literature, and Pedagogy
Meghan Freeman and Elizabeth Cherry, Manhattanville College

14:45-15:00 Concluding Remarks

16:00-17:00 Visit – Lincoln Cathedral

Full Programme (with abstracts)

Day One: September 11^th 2023 

10:00-10:30 Registration and Coffee

10:30-12:00 Panel 1

Bird Boxes and Sparrow Traps: The Technological Regulation of Avian Life in the United States
Matthew Holmes, University of Stavanger

Only a few decades after its introduction to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, the house sparrow (Passer domesticus) had been labeled a pest and foreign invader which drove away native birds. Its downfall is representative of a familiar story to scholars of animals and technology, who have explored how mechanical, chemical, and biological methods have all been used to control or exclude unwanted species from both rural and urban areas. One crucial difference which sets the case of the house sparrow apart, however, is that the birds had made their homes in bird boxes, built technologies designed to attract avian species and bring them closer to people. This article argues that, consequently, bird boxes became a tool of animal regulation in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Contemporary books, periodicals, newspapers, and patent applications show how American ornithologists and inventors devised numerous ways to exclude sparrows from bird boxes, modifying them to become less attractive to that species. Others incorporated traps into bird boxes, killing sparrows directly or enabling their human users to destroy their eggs and nests. These efforts suggest that bird boxes should fall into the category of technologies or technological systems which mediate and regulate our relationship with nature by encouraging or controlling certain aspects of living things. Although technological fixes to the sparrow problem were ultimately ineffective, this history also warns against the assumption that bringing people into closer contact with nature will soften their attitudes towards animals perceived to be problematic.

‘A Superior Race’: How Macaques Became Botanical Collectors in EJH Corner’s Singapore
Nathan Smith, National Museum of Wales

Edred John Henry Corner (1906-1996) remains a provocative figure in the history of the tropical botany and mycology. Whilst his later career saw him appointed a Professor at the University of Cambridge, he previously had served as the Assistant Director at the Singapore Botanical Garden during a period which included the region’s occupation by Japanese forces. 

During his time in Singapore, Corner initiated the training and breeding of macaques (known locally as beroks) for the collection of botanical and mycological specimens. With the programmed ultimately ending upon the fall of Singapore to Japan, it nevertheless raises interesting questions in twentieth century understandings of animal agency and their intellectual and emotional capacity. 

The paper presented will explore this exciting, if brief, period of Corner’s life and work. It will show how Corner incorporated local and indigenous language and knowledge into his training of the beroks and explore how Corner’s monkeys fit into his wider philosophy and practice. In doing so, it hopes to shed light on, in the words of his Royal Society obituary—”one of the most colourful, and controversial, biologists of the century”.

Connecting Farm Animals to Human Health in Leprosy Settlements in Colonial Nigeria, 1926-1940
Susan Iseyen, Princeton University (DID NOT ATTEND).

In about 1940, Scottish doctor and missionary, Andrew Macdonald and film director, James A. Ballantyne, produced the silent documentary, In His Name: The Epic of Itu Leper Colony. This forty-seven-minute documentary visualizes the history of a leprosy settlement through human leprosy subjects’ engagements in fishing, farming, craft and building techniques, as essential to their self-sustaining community. Yet the animal presence is largely explicit as moving images of farm animals take central stage within the leprosy settlement. Using this silent documentary as a point of departure, my paper attempts to move beyond an anthropocentric analysis which might typically prioritize human actions and reduce animals to symbols of culture. Instead, I explore a previously undocumented animal history through the lens of leprosy settlements. I frame healthy, industrious farm animals as essential to the self-sustaining economy through husbandry and improvement of human nourishment in most leprosy institutions in colonial southeastern Nigeria.

Livestock’s two-fold distinctive roles as subjects of nutrition and agriculture offers evidence of non-human animals’ ability to shape medical knowledge and practice between the late 1920s and 1940s, and I situate them within the functionality and success of leprosy settlements. In revealing the centrality of farm animals to leprosy settlements, I emphasize the considerable influence they wielded over human health. The narrative power of this silent visual story bear witness to the agency of non-human animals who provided the stage on which the human history of leprosy establishments played out in the era of colonization.

12:00-13:00 Lunch

13:00-14:30 Panel 2

The introduction of a “Dracula from the deeps”: how a fish became re-imagined as an aquatic invader and subjected to an elaborate eradication programme. 
Vincent Bijman, Maastricht University

During the mid 1940s, commercial fishers and scientists active in the American and Canadian Great Lakes became increasingly concerned with the predatory activity of the Sea Lamprey, a fish that resembles the eel, which in the previous decades had found its way into the Great Lakes. Its parasitic behavior, especially by attacking Lake Trout, a fish valuable for local commercial fisheries, became regarded as a major cause for the complete collapse of Great Lakes fisheries – an industry that had been majorly affected by lake pollution and overfishing since the late 19^th century. Great Lakes conservationists and Fish and Wildlife Service officials responded by setting up a large-scale control campaign, first by utilizing fish weirs and traps, and by the late 1950s applying a selective toxin that targeted the Sea Lamprey ammocetes (larvae). The history of the Sea Lamprey invasion is illustrative of how certain animals became re-imagined as problematic invasive species during the mid of the 20^th century. Since the start of Great Lakes Sea lamprey control, the political-institutional context, utilization of the Great Lakes as a natural space, knowledge practices and (pest) fish control activities have changed considerably, while Sea Lamprey control remained a major activity. This topic allows for a discussion on how a newly introduced animal becomes re-imagined as a problematic invasive species, and how changing scientific activities affect the ways in which we interact with problematic introduced or pest species.

No strings attached – the changing fortunes of the red kite in the Anthropocene
Virginia Thomas, University of Exeter

Numbers of red kites in Britain have fluctuated over the course of their shared history with humans. Interestingly, while human appreciation of kites has also varied, this appreciation has not always been directly proportional to kite numbers. Broadly speaking, humans have a tendency to value the rare, and this value system is evident in wildlife conservation, where rare species can attract significant attention and conservation effort.  

Nonetheless, in Medieval Britain, while kites were common, they were highly valued for their role as scavengers which helped to keep city streets clean. A change in human attitudes to the kite came with the introduction of the Preservation of Grain Act (1532). This classified kites as vermin in the eyes of the law and subsequently changed how people saw them – not only were they now a pest but they were also a means to make money since, under the Act, financial incentives were offered for the killing of kites. 

Falling kite numbers saw another shift in attitudes towards them – they were now valued for their rarity by egg collectors and taxidermists. Rather than bringing protection, this appreciation further endangered the kites as they were valued more as specimens than living species. 

In more recent times, the kite’s extreme rarity in Britain has seen its intrinsic value as native wildlife that is vulnerable to extinction recognised: it has been afforded protection and a reintroduction programme was established in 1990. While some welcome the return of this charismatic bird, its rise in numbers have led others to classify it as a pest once again. 

This paper will discuss human attitudes to kites, especially in relation to their rising and falling numbers, and how we might learn to co-exist with the kite to allow mutual flourishing in the Anthropocene. 

Bones and Bearward Diaries
Liam Lewis and Hannah O’Regan, Box Office Bears AHRC Project

In early modern England, animal baiting rivalled dramatic performance in popularity. During these years, the “game” grew in commercial potential, generating an array of fixed arenas or playing places and an expansion in nationwide touring routes. Contemporary sources suggest that several dogs were brought into a yard tied up, then a bull or bear brought in and tied to a stake. Dogs would be set upon the bull or bear, and many dogs were killed in the process. Other variations on this practice also took place, either with different species used for baiting (such as bulls, cockerels, and monkeys) or with events taking place in different types of venue (such as streets and town squares), and the “sport” was also occasionally associated with the performance of human and other animals.

The Box Office Bears project combines zooarchaeology, archaeogenetics, archival research, and performance studies to investigate the lives of animals involved in baiting in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this paper, we discuss the interdisciplinary research currently underway on the project, bringing together zooarchaeology, biomolecular archaeology, archival research, and wrestling performance workshops. This approach combines contemporary accounts of baiting with data from the skeletal remains of animal bones from Bankside (London), to explore how bears lived, to examine where they may have come from, to investigate their activities, journeys and celebrity identities, and to question how these animals were exploited to “perform” before a public.

14:30-15:00 Break

15:00-16:30 Panel 3

Cattle and sheep meet artists on the FIELD
FIELD Project

This paper reflects on an artist-in-residence (AiR) programme held as part of an interdisciplinary research project (FIELD) to explore the endemic diseases of sheep and cattle. The key contribution of this article lies in revealing how animals shaped the conduct and creative processes of the AiR scheme. Drawing on reflective interviews with each of the three artists, this paper explores how the encounters came about and how they selected their animal subjects; secondly, what happened in the encounters and how the artists built relationships with animals and thirdly, what happened as a result of the encounters, how these changed understandings of animal behaviour and the implications for their own behaviour, and how these invoked particular types of creative responses.

The methodology of George Stubbs and its relevance to a contemporary Art & Science investigation
Liz Sherratt, University of Lincoln

English painter George Stubbs is best known as a preeminent equine artist during the eighteenth century. These portraits, often commissioned by wealthy horse owners, are considered in the league of artistic works by the likes of other distinguished artists such as Turner and Constable. 

However, setting Stubbs’ work apart from other livestock/animal portraitists of the time was his intense anatomical research. Through this research, Stubbs both learned about the anatomy of the horse—enabling him to create life-like images, but also connected him with the wider world of animal scientists of the time. Stubbs worked with notable scientists such as the Hunter brothers and Joseph Banks, and through these connections and his own professional reputation, was seen not just as an artist, but a horse expert in his own right. This is rather unsurprising, as during this period, the divide between artist and scientist was not fully drawn, which allowed for what we would now label ‘cross-disciplinary’ collaboration and exchanges of ideas. 

Today, this kind of multidisciplinary approach is often regarded as novel, however in this paper, I will show that multi-disciplinary working is not a new phenomenon and illustrate how it can be used to better understand animals. Specifically, I will show how I have used Stubbs’ approach to understanding horses in my own research, which explores equine welfare from an arts and sciences standpoint. By combining my artistic practice of observational drawing along with scientific findings about horse behavior, I shed new light on how we can understand what it might be like to be a horse. 

Dogma versus data: challenging the mythologies of pedigree dog breeding
Alison Skipper, Royal Veterinary College

No domestic animal more embodies human cultural values than the dog. For over a hundred and fifty years, pedigree dog breeders have literally reshaped canine bodies to reflect their own aesthetic preferences, informed by successive scientific theories and inspired by changing social preoccupations. But veterinarians and biologists today caution that decades of rigid ‘pure breeding’, where each breed is strictly maintained as a genetically isolated population, have created a toxic legacy, with breeds often weakened through long-term inbreeding and plagued by inherited diseases. Moreover, while outcrossing between breeds could correct such problems by introducing valuable genetic diversity, many breeders reject this remedy. They use history to justify their practices, presenting themselves as custodians of an irreplaceable cultural and biological heritage of ‘breed purity’, which, they argue, would be ruined by such reforms. 

In this paper, I invert this argument, using history itself to overturn the mythologised tenet of rigid ‘pure breeding’ and provide an evidence-based justification for the radical reconceptualisation of dog breeding traditions. I use British archival materials to show that the official registers that record canine breed lineages have drastically shifted in purpose and function over time, and that ‘pure breeding’ itself is a mutable concept whose meaning has fundamentally changed. Through quantitative analysis of published and private breeding records, I present the closed gene pool as a temporally contingent artefact of mid-twentieth century ideologies. I thereby recast history from an obstacle to the advancement of canine welfare to a tool that helps to justify dog breeding reform.

17:00-18:00 Keynote

(Re)inventing the Interdisciplinary Wheel? Environmental collaboration in past and present
Dr Angela Cassidy, University of Exeter

In 1976, Francesco Castri, the founder of UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere (MAB) programme, laid out three “imperatives for success” in interdisciplinary research, an approach which he believed was required for understanding ecological problems. These imperatives sound strangely familiar: i) focus on a specific, shared problems; ii) find a topical scope (in time and space) that works for natural and human systems; iii) ensure that responsibility is shared across all involved, and that human research does not take the form of “some sort of postnatal benediction” to natural sciences.  While the MAB programme has persisted, primarily in the form of the UNESCO Biosphere Reserves, Castri’s advice did not – at least not formally.  In this paper, I will reflect upon intriguing collective habits of remembering – and forgetting – across generations of scientists investigating the relationships between humans, other animals, and wider environments.   I will discuss emerging findings from RENEW, in which we are investigating interdisciplinary biodiversity collaborations in past and present; and place these in dialogue with my own experiences of working as an ‘undisciplined scholar’ in projects that have combined social sciences, natural sciences and humanities in a variety of configurations.  In RENEW, we are collating and analysing experiential learning about working across disciplines into a Practice Guide for researchers and professionals.  This emphasises the importance of sociality and care; multiple, complementary modes of interdisciplinary practice, and highlights the need for open reflection on some big, difficult ‘elephants in the room’ often present in such projects.  I will close by asking how the collaborative contributions of nonhuman animals can be better documented and lay out our plans for building an open archive of environmental collaboration, which will document, collate and communicate past interdisciplinary experiences for future researchers.

19:00 Conference Dinner

Day Two: September 12^th 2023

10:15-10:45 Arrival and Coffee

10:45-12:15 Panel 4

‘Karl Marx, Animal Liberationist? A Challenge to Animal Studies’
Billy Godfrey, Loughborough University

In spite of a recent uptick in interest, animal liberation remains undertheorised from critical Marxist perspectives. The idea that animal liberation is a bourgeois concern persists among many Marxists, while those working in animal studies tend to dismiss or ignore the work of Marxists because of Marxism’s alleged anthropocentrism and human chauvinism. 

Marx’s natural scientific notebooks from the late 1860s give us reason to believe that Marxism and animal liberation are more compatible than either of these depictions suggest. In this period Marx became interested in the latest developments in capitalist agriculture. Throughout the notebooks he indicates his belief that nonhuman animals must be liberated from the capitalist system that forces them to reach maturity much quicker than even their recent ancestors, and which leaves them malformed and increasingly susceptible to disease. 

Crucially for our purposes, Marx’s interest in these developments challenges the supposed incompatibility of Marxism and animal studies. I argue that his engagement with this literature sharpened his wider ecological critique, informing his work on the robbery system of agriculture, the pollution of waterways, and the proliferation of deadly pathogens. These notebooks also reveal the extent to which Marx’s work on animals informed other elements of his critique of political economy – we see traces of this research throughout volumes II and III of Capital. Reading Marx in this way encourages us to reconsider the antagonism between Marxism and animal liberation and invites further Marxist intervention in animal studies.

Still Alive: Nonhuman Animals in the Art of Giovanni da Udine
Esme Garlake, University College London

This paper explores the ways in which the lived experiences of nonhuman animals are invariably transformed, muted and erased within Western art, and how we may start to recover nonhuman subjectivities when we disrupt our habits of looking. The central case study focuses on the artistic representations of nonhuman animals by Italian painter Giovanni da Udine (1487-1561), who was employed specifically to paint the flora and fauna in Raphael’s workshop during the 1510s. We will explore how his naturalism of art was celebrated in his day, as it was tightly bound to both contemporary antiquarian interests and to patrons’ desires to visually declare their access to ‘exotic’ animals, foods and plants from distant lands. Today, art historians tend to focus on Giovanni’s observational accuracy as a signifier of the beginnings of Enlightenment empiricism (an approach which, this paper argues, must be balanced alongside ecocritical considerations).

Through an analysis of Giovanni’s observational drawings of both dead and alive nonhuman animals, this paper finds parallels with feminist and decolonial approaches to art history which emphasise the unequal power dynamics between artist and sitter (invariably a process of objectification). By seeking to recover the traces of nonhuman histories and suffering in Giovanni’s art, it is possible to better understand the inevitable anthropocentrism of artistic practice and reception. Finally, this paper proposes that an art history which critically engages with nonhuman animal histories is a powerful and necessary tool for shifting our current perspectives on human/nonhuman relationships today, particularly at a time of ecological and climate breakdown.

Arts-based methods and animal history: the case of Pavlov’s dogs
Matthew Adams, University of Brighton

In this talk I share reflections on work undertaken for an AHRC Fellowship, titled Pavlov and the kingdom of dogs: Storying experimental animal histories through arts-based research. Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) is well known for the concept of ‘classical conditioning’ and his experiments with dogs. However, the detail of the lives and experiences of the hundreds of dogs that lived and died in Pavlov’s St Petersburg (later Petrograd/Leningrad) lab complex over a fifty-plus year career are rarely discussed. The project places the experiences of experimental animals firmly in the spotlight, revealing a range of practices and relations that challenge accepted understandings of experimental animal welfare, their contribution to ‘classic’ studies, and the nature of scientific and psychological practice. As well as scholarship and academic outputs, the project involves the collaborative cross-disciplinary production of two artefacts: a graphic novel and a multi-piece diorama-based exhibition (a diorama being a three-dimensional miniature scale model). The graphic novel (or comic book / long-form work of sequential art) focuses on the experiences of dogs as they are entangled with the life of Pavlov, the city and wider upheavals in science, politics and society. The diorama-based exhibition playfully recreates and reimagines scenes, places and practices in Pavlov’s lab complex at different moments in time. This presentation will reflect on the rewards and challenges of attempting to work across disciplines in this context; and specifically on arts-based methods as a way of exploring and communicating animal history.

12:15-13:15 Lunch

13:15-14:45 Panel 5

One cow leads to another
Sue Bradley, Newcastle University

As an oral historian working on FIELD (Farm-level Interdisciplinary approaches to Endemic Livestock Disease), I expected my work would chiefly consist of recording new interviews, so when Covid prevented face-to-face meetings, it felt like a serious set-back. In fact, it opened a wider door to animals in two significant ways.

The first was when it was suggested I invite FIELD’s artists-in-residence (Michele Allen, Shane Finan and Mark Richard Jones) to talk over Zoom about their experiences of working with the project and it turned out that some of the most compelling involved encounters with animals. The second was archival. I had searched existing oral histories for accounts of endemic livestock disease and found few details. After listening to the artists, I returned to these collections with an ear to what they could reveal if not about diseases then about the lives of sheep and cattle in the past. 

Later, when I resumed interviewing, animals I had met in this way would come into the conversation, whether overtly, as I shared and discussed an account with an interviewee, or as an invisible prompt to specific questions. Then, in response, an interviewee might talk about particular animals they themselves had known. In this short presentation, I show how animals remembered from different perspectives – like the cow whom two boys struggled to lead by halter from St John’s-in-the-Vale to Langdale a century ago (Ambleside Oral History Archive) – or Dandelion, who helped Shane to ‘see sheep as an artist’  – can lead back and forth across time to another, and another.

Horse power to Horsepower: animal absences in Birmingham’s industrial collections
Felicity McWilliams, Birmingham Museums Trust

At times nicknamed the ‘city of a thousand trades’ and the ‘workshop of the world’, Birmingham has deep industrial roots. These are extremely well represented by the city’s internationally significant Science & Industry collection of some 45,000 objects, which began to be acquired in the middle of the nineteenth century and found their first dedicated home in the city’s Museum of Science & Industry in 1951. Much of that collection is now housed in the MS&I’s successor, Thinktank Science Museum. A walk around Thinktank’s four floors quickly introduces you to Birmingham’s pivotal role in the history of engineering, transport and manufacturing, from cars to custard and buttons to beam engines. The museum is certainly not without animals; two galleries showcase the city’s Natural Science collection through the themes of climate change and the natural environment. One species, however, is conspicuously absent.

That horses were vital agents of industrialisation in both urban and rural contexts has been extensively demonstrated by animal historians and historians of technology alike, as has their frequent invisibility in wider historiography. Taking Birmingham’s collection as its core case study, however, this paper explores the extent to which those histories are represented in industrial museum collections. It will explore why animal absences might exist within collections, as well as the challenges of uncovering animal histories within material culture and making them visible. Finally, the paper will reflect on the potential of animal history for engaging museum audiences in both historical and contemporary stories of technology and industry.

Teaching Citizen Bird: Animal History, Literature, and Pedagogy
Meghan Freeman and Elizabeth Cherry, Manhattanville College

As an intellectual community, animal studies has always encouraged and been enriched by interdisciplinary collaboration, resulting in scholarship that draws upon a variety of critical lenses in its fundamental resistance to anthropocentric thinking. Yet, that vibrant interdisciplinarity is often lost on the journey to the classroom, as academics who might use interdisciplinary approaches in their own scholarship find themselves constrained by the fundamental disciplinarity of higher education. Both of us (a scholar of nineteenth-century literature and history and an environmental sociologist, respectively) have encountered such constraints in our own teaching lives, and our proposal to this conference is to share the results of our ongoing collaborative work towards a solution. This joint project is an in-process annotated edition of Citizen Bird, an 1897 work of children’s literature, intended to educate Progressive-era American children in the principles of birding and the rich complexity of “bird-life” as it is lived by the “citizens of the air.” Though a fascinating and productive text from an animal history perspective, Citizen Bird might nevertheless be considered a tough sell from a teaching standpoint—it is “outdated” in its overt didacticism, its narrow concept of citizenship, and its approach to birding. Our argument is that these perceived limitations are strengths, if placed within a scholarly edition rich with explanatory annotations and supplementary materials, which would allow instructors in a variety of disciplines to teach Citizen Bird “interdisciplinarily” and with a primary focus on birds as actants and agents beyond the interest they generate in human viewers.

14:45-15:00 Concluding Remarks

16:00-17:00 Cathedral Visit