Term One
Our Seminar Series is back for 2025/2026.
Seminars will be held at 8pm UK Time. Please sign up using the links below. Joining information will be sent shortly before the event.
12 November 2025
Discovering the okapi – book talk
Simon Pooley, Birkbeck University of London
My talk will be based on my forthcoming monograph coming out with Johns Hopkins UP in November 2025. It tells the story of the okapi’s “discovery” in 1900 by British naturalist Sir Harry Johnston, as well as the overlooked contributions of the Indigenous African people whose expertise made this sighting and subsequent hunt for specimens possible.
The book traces how colonial politics and scientific racism shaped early accounts of the animal’s study and examines the enduring biases that continue to influence conservation efforts today.
The okapi became a symbol of scientific curiosity, colonial power, and conservation challenges, revealing complex intersections among biodiversity, cultural heritage, and environmental stewardship.
10 December 2025
The Fall of a Florican: Two hundred years of hunting, studying, and conserving Houbaropsis bengalensis
Nisha Bhakat, NCBS
From being called the best-tasting gamebird India has to offer, to one the most threatened birds in the subcontinent, the Bengal Florican has captured attention and engagement in various ways. Our current understanding of the species’ ecology appears to be comprehensive at first glance, however cracks start to appear when one looks deeper. This paper, using primary archival records, colonial-era publications, and modern research articles, critically examines this knowledge in context of two centuries of our engagement with the species. The exercise reveals we have had a one track, one sex, one season view of a species with a far more complex natural history of which much is still unknown. Most prominently, very little focus has been given to female birds in modern research and our understanding of male birds’ behaviour, movement, and habitat requirements has been extrapolated as knowledge of the species as a whole. Older records reveal the female birds as a distinct entity that engage with the environment and their own species in ways that makes Hodgson note ‘a rigorous separation of the sexes, such as I fancy no other species could furnish a parallel to’. The gap in research runs deep, affecting our knowledge for even basic information like population estimates. This paper compiles the body of knowledge, summarizing the knowns and revealing the unknowns, and proposes future priorities of research and conservation for the critically endangered species.
Term Two
28 January 2026
The Horse Ground: Equine-Human Relationships in early Kentucky, 1760-1790
Dr Catriona M Paul, University of Limerick
This paper explores equine-human relationships in the colonial and revolutionary world of the American backcountry at the end of the eighteenth century. In this period, Kentucky was riven by conflict between Indigenous Americans and settler-colonists, and by the violence that played out between Loyalist and Patriot. Presenting evidence of the co-dependency of humans and horses in this war-torn era, the paper argues that horses and humans were shaped by their interactions with each other, and that these relationships informed the history and identity of the state of Kentucky through the nineteenth century and beyond.
A principal source for this paper are the interviews with settler-colonists carried out by the Reverend John Dabney Shane in the 1840s. In a recent article for Animal Studies Journal, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey and Lynette Russell argue for a ‘triadic’ approach to Human-Animal Studies – ‘always involving at least three sides; Settler-Coloniser, Indigene and Animal’. Careful interpretation of the Shane interviews and the horse stories and equine behaviours therein described, presents the opportunity to identify colonisation – of space, of non-human animals, of Indigenous people – in action, whilst also unpicking those attitudes, ‘disarming colonial logics’ and recognising the agency of non-human actors.
25 February 2026
Challenging the ‘Voiceless Animal’: Talking Dogs and Animal Spirituality in Early-Twentieth-Century Anti-Vivisection Campaigns
Laura Brown, Northumbria University
‘Gifted’ animals – such as the Elberfeld Horses – became a popular phenomenon in early twentieth century Europe, both in the field of experimental psychology but also in the public imagination. It did not take long for some animal protection campaigners to see the potential for the inclusion of such case studies in their anti-cruelty arguments. This paper explores how anti-vivisectionists leveraged well-known cases of animal communication and intelligence to argue for the compassionate treatment of nonhuman animals, on the basis that they demonstrated a level of consciousness akin to that of human beings.
To trace these claims about the spiritual status of nonhuman animals, the paper utilises books and periodicals published between 1920 and 1940 by those who promoted such beliefs. The French Spiritualist Carita Borderieux, who wrote about the moral consequences of the intelligence displayed by her dog, Zou, serves as one case study. So too do Lizzy Lind-af-Hageby and Nina Douglas-Hamilton (founders of the Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society and vocal Spiritualists) whose interest in Kuno von Schwertberg – a talking dachshund from Weimar – was widely documented.
The paper considers how – despite being rooted in an earnest belief in their latent spiritual, emotional and intellectual potential of all animals – anti-vivisection arguments which showcased talking dogs were labelled ‘anthropomorphic’ and ‘sentimental’. Despite these disparaging responses, the paper argues that the belief in inter-species communication during the first half of the twentieth century represents an early attempt to disrupt the rhetoric which presents animals as ‘helpless’ and ‘voiceless’ in animal protection campaigns.
18 March 2026
Materialising the Leonine Narrative
Dr. Suzanne Amy Foxley, University of Erfurt
Lions are omnipresent in European culture: they glower beside grand staircases, roar from banks, cars, and cereal boxes, stand tall for shields and coats of arms…
Although lions have been physically transported to Europe since antiquity, often scholarly focus has been placed on the “lion of the mind” (Preston 2022: 93), privileging philosophical symbolism and two-dimensional depictions. While ink and paint have long captured lions in countless artistic forms, the fate of living lions, especially those kept in early modern courtly menageries, has been scarcely studied (Hornstein 2024).
This paper investigates the materiality of preserved lions, examining how the medium of taxidermy intersects with artistic conventions and reflects changing relationships between humankind and nature. The paper argues that biological matter itself can act as a narrator: shaped by taxidermic technique and cultural imagination, lions become silent witnesses of their time, turning into materialised oxymorons: despite being frozen, mounts and taxidermized specimens are constantly transforming through changing social norms and interpretations, binding together the past, the present and the future. Placing the mount “Lion Attacking A Dromedary” at the focus of my research, this paper examines the intersection of narrative and specimen. Attending to this materiality not only fills a research gap but also reframes leonine matter as an active component in a multidisciplinary history of human–animal relations.
15 April 2026
Urban Exploiters: A More-Than-Animal Analysis of Raccoon Interventions in Urban Canadian Spaces
Mady Rodrigues-Raby, University of Toronto
Raccoons have been leaving their five-fingered pawprints all over Canadian urban spaces for centuries. Raccoon histories intersect with a wide range of topics including pet-keeping, animal psychology, medicine, environmental conservation and urbanization. This paper examines the multi-faceted identities that raccoons took on, or were assigned by humans, in early 20th century Canada. Raccoons’ encroachment into human areas was often perceived to be malevolent due to their growing association with human traits. This same association enabled raccoons to transcend their existence as object-body. Their survival skills garnered the attention of animal behaviourists, who wrote extensively about their superior intelligence, reinforcing ideas about raccoons’ biological closeness to humans. Raccoons bodies were also critically interpreted by intellectuals – how they used their sense of touch to explore their world differentiated them from the rest of the animal kingdom. Finally, the practice of raccoon pet-keeping blurred lines between wild animal and companion animal. This paper argues that raccoon behaviours transgressed their prescribed role in settler-colonial Canada and unsettled Western orderings of the natural world. Raccoon interventions in Toronto and other urban areas defied expectations as animals of a ‘lower order,’ resulting in them taking on an entirely new identity as intelligent, more-than-animal beings.
13 May 2026
Swiftlet Climbs – Masculinity and the Nest Trade
Dr Natalie Lis, University of Queensland
Swiftlets have long been entangled in gendered and political projects, their nests serving as both commodities and markers of masculine prestige. This paper traces the shifting masculinities of swiftlet nest harvesting, from ancient cave expeditions to the late twentieth-century rise of purpose-built towers. For centuries, people climbed precarious cliffs and cave walls to collect edible nests, a dangerous practice requiring strength and endurance. Nests gathered through such feats became elite delicacies and the basis of a lucrative trade. By the late twentieth century, intensifying demand for bird’s nest soup transformed harvesting from interactions with landscape to human-built architecture. Retrofitted warehouses, abandoned shophouses, and hybrid domestic structures replaced caves as primary sites of extraction. Some operated illegally, outside zoning and health regulations, provoking public complaints and state scrutiny. Yet these towers also functioned as symbols of entrepreneurial virility, recasting masculine authority as mastery over urban space and speculative economies. Government regulation further politicised the industry, as authorities sought to capture revenues, manage ecological damage, and assert control over an unruly trade. The swiftlet tower thus marks a shift from physical risk to abstract performances of masculine control through financial speculation, architectural improvisation, and regulatory negotiation. Drawing briefly on my research into industrial poultry farming, the paper situates swiftlets within a wider pattern in which avian commodities are organised through gendered infrastructures of power. Understanding these dynamics reveals how human-built avian architectures enact and reproduce systems of domination that bind human masculinity to the commodification of nonhuman life.
Summer 2026
10 Year Celebration of the Animal History Group Event.
Details to be confirmed.
Term One
15 October 2025
Defining Animal Well-Being: Sciences and Practices of Care in Italian Animal Husbandry
Miriam Borgia, University of Bologna and EHESS-CRH (Paris)
At the end of the eighteenth century in parts of Italian territory, following the French model, the first veterinary medicine schools were established to address the recurrent epizootics. This constituted not only a hygienic concern, but also an economic imperative. Within this context, and with increasing emphasis throughout the nineteenth century, it became progressively evident that a productive animal, particularly in the case of cattle, was primarily a healthy animal. However, how was one to define a healthy animal? And what was the tension between care and exploitation? In this contribution, I will examine how veterinarians, small-scale farmers, and zootechnics sought to establish this definition through considerations of nutrition, reproduction, and behavior. Knowledge and practices concerning animal well-being were experimented with in the stables, with particular attention to illumination, ventilation, and temperature control. They also emerged through veterinary care, administered by empirical practitioners or trained veterinarians, and through the challenges inherent in selecting and improving local breeds. Ultimately, the treatment provided to animals directly influenced the quality of derived products (most notably milk and meat). Throughout the nineteenth century, animal husbandry became distinct from agriculture and by century’s end some zootechnics asserted that livestock farming was no longer merely a “necessary evil” – that is, an enterprise fraught with sanitary and economic risks yet essential to agricultural practice – but rather an autonomous economic sector and a legitimate scientific discipline, whose success depended entirely upon the care accorded to animals and the application of knowledge from zootechnical and veterinary sciences.
AHG 