Our programme for 2023/24 will be announced soon.

Please sign up using the links below. Joining information will be sent shortly before the event.

Term Two

17 April 2024

Painting Animals in 18^th-century Saint-Domingue

Professor Victoria Dickenson, McGill Library and Collections

Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) was the richest colony in the French Empire in the 18^th century. Columbus visited the island of Hispaniola in 1492 and described great flocks of parrots darkening the skies. By the time the French engineer René Gabriel de Rabié (1717-85) arrived in 1742, the environment had been impacted by the intensive agriculture of sugarcane, coffee, indigo and cocoa plantations worked by enslaved peoples.

In the 1760s, de Rabié began to paint the plants and animals he encountered around his home in Cap Français and on his travels around the coast. By the time he left the island to return to France in 1784, he had amassed hundreds of watercolour drawings, as well as notes on habitats, habits and local names. He was assisted in this enterprise of natural history documentation by his daughter Jacquette Anne Marie Rabié de la Boissière and by the many enslaved people who worked as gardeners, cooks, household servants, fishers, paddlers and divers.

De Rabié was not the only European to document the novel (to him) flora and fauna he encountered in Saint Domingue. In addition to published records, there are numerous manuscript journals and drawings by engineers, members of the French military, doctors and plantation owners. These works reveal not only a European framework for the natural world, but also provide insight into the ways enslaved African and Indigenous peoples viewed this environment.

The four albums of de Rabié’s paintings are now preserved in the Blacker Wood Natural History Collection of McGill University Library in Montreal. Through close reading of original images, manuscript notes and published records, and through discussions with contemporary Haitian experts and residents, our research group is attempting to understand better how animals and people interacted on Saint Domingue in the 18^th century, and how we can ensure a more inclusive documentation of historical records.

This research is part of the three-year research project Hidden Hands in Colonial Natural History Collections, funded through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ahg-seminar-april-17th-tickets-707754983207

15 May 2024

Saving the American Elk with Camera

Dr Vanessa Bateman, Maastricht University

Saving the American Elk with Camera

In the 1890s hunting guide and rancher Stephen N. Leek of Jackson Hole, Wyoming was gifted a camera by his client George Eastman (of Eastman Kodak Company) and began to practice wildlife photography as a hobby. Simultaneously, Euro-American settlement in the region was causing what became known as the “elk problem,” an annual famine in which thousands of elk (wapiti) were dying of starvation in the winter. Newly erected fencing and agriculture disrupted their historic migration routes and food sources, while the eradication of predators had increased elk populations beyond range capacity. With his camera, Leek began documenting the demise of elk and community efforts to feed them—images that were widely circulated in publications and traveling slide lectures as a way to both advocate for their protection and promote his work and the region to sporting tourists. Due in part to Leek’s advocacy, the National Elk Refuge was established in 1912, annually home to one of the largest elk herds in the world each winter, where they have been supplementally fed for over a century. While Leek’s legacy as the “father of the elk” has been (regionally) celebrated, my research also reveals his direct involvement in the Bannock Uprising of 1895, a violent attack against Indigenous hunting rights. I argue that Leek’s animal photographs represent power and control over hunting rights from a settler-colonial viewpoint and that early forms of wildlife management served not only to advocate for the well-being of animals but also to gain control of animals for economic and political purposes. Moving beyond Leek’s story, this talk will discuss how the visual culture of elk and their material traces—in the form of photography, film, and naturally shed antlers—continued to play an important role in their management and local tourism throughout the twentieth century.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ahg-seminar-may-15th-tickets-707755324227

Term One

For term one, we will depart from our usual seminar events and instead host a series of reading groups which focus on short primary sources around a particular ‘animal history’ theme. There will be 3 sessions, each lasting 90 minutes, taking place at 7pm on a Monday evening.

The sessions will be led by Dr Lee Raye (@LeafyHistory) – to whom we extend a huge thanks for offering to contribute to the programme in this way! 

Readings will be circulated to those who have registered roughly 3 weeks prior to the session.

16 October 2023

The Colosseum of Ancient Rome 

6 November 2023

The extinction of the wolf in Japan

11 December 2023

The viper-hunters of the 18^th – 19^th century in western Europe

Term Two

17 January 2024

ECR Panel

Clay Accumulators: Intersections of Material Culture, Environment, and Symbolism across Majapahit Java and the Early Medieval West

Ryan Mealiffe, University of Oxford

A common representation of incremental saving and frugality, the piggy bank is perhaps one of the most instantly recognizable novelty items found around the world today. Given their present-day ubiquity, it is only natural to wonder about their origin and the association between pigs and penny-pinching. Although we might associate piggy banks with western modernity, an impressive number of terracotta “piggy banks” (known as cèlèngan) were produced on the other side of the continent in Majapahit Java (1293 – c. 1527). I contend that piggy banks are a
reminder that medieval Eurasia was interconnected by commonalities often taken for granted today – ceramic production, small-denomination currency, and a disposition to think with animals. These threads of shared history crossed with local particularities around the Java Sea – agricultural trade, Hindu-Buddhist cosmology, associations of gender, status, and power, and a constant and deep familiarity with pigs as resilient and unruly beings – to produce the uniquely Javanese cèlèngan. Drawing upon archaeology, art history, and lessons from the animal history of medieval Europe, this paper invites the possibility that the imagery of the fierce yet fecund boar was deeply associated with displays of power and status and the role of Majapahit royalty to maintain the balance of the earth, between water and land as well as people and pigs, for the trade empire to thrive. As a case study, the Majapahit cèlèngan challenges assumptions of singular or few points of origin, displays limits of comparative studies, and reveals the impact of animal agency on material culture.

Lameness in sheep: An unremarkable history?

Nicole Gosling, University of Lincoln

For more than a century, lameness has been an endemic problem in sheep farming. It has been a prevalent and costly disease causing pain for sheep throughout this time and remains so today. Despite its prevalence, and the threats it posed, it did not receive widespread or long-term veterinary investigation in the UK until 1994. One might be excused for assuming that until that point, the disease generated little concern, or was simply overlooked or ignored. However, in this talk I will show that this was not the case. Lameness was repeatedly problematized and repeatedly generated calls for intervention. These calls to action and attempts at control however have been overlooked because they resulted in no significant reduction of the disease; In simple terms, they did not work. While these actions were considered failures in their own time, and may be deemed historical ‘dead ends’, considering them provides invaluable insight into the management and attitudes towards endemic livestock disease in the past. Specifically, this talk will consider how and when lameness was problematized throughout the twentieth century, will outline attempts to intervene, and will explore why these attempts were unsuccessful. Finally, this talk will consider why, given that there has been an increase in attention towards the problem over the past thirty years, the disease persists today.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ahg-seminar-jan-17th-tickets-707750118657

21 February 2024

Calm at the Carriage, Kills Bandits, Protects the Stables: Unique Names for Postal Horses Discovered in First Century BCE Xuanquan Documents

Dr. Kelsey Granger, Ludwig-Maximilian University

Following its excavation in 1990–1992, the Xuanquan 懸泉 postal station in Gansu, China has become one of the most significant sources of excavated texts from the Han 漢 period (202 BCE–220 CE). As the only unearthed postal station with such a staggering number of written documents, the site has been avidly studied by scholars of the early Silk Roads and Han China’s administration. However, Xuanquan was not just home to humans – remains of a stable area have been uncovered to the south of the site and countless references are made to the station’s postal horses among the 23,000 extant documents excavated from the site. 

Combining the disciplines of archaeology, history, and animal studies, this talk aims to uncover underlying human-horse relationships through close reading of these administrative documents. In particular, the unique names of horses (Captures Bandits, Skittish Fish, and Mr. Huang the Red, for instance) provide intriguing glimpses into the emotional entanglements staged between humans and horses at Xuanquan.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ahg-seminar-feb-21st-tickets-707753649217

20 March 2024

ECR Panel

Animals in Vogue: Exploring the discourses US Vogue magazine constructs around the use of animals in fashion across the 20th and 21st century

Chloe Dawson, Keele University 

The aim of this paper is to present research conducted on US Vogue magazine that explores how the fashion industry presents the use of animals across the 20th and 21st century. This work investigates how the magazine navigates wider social critique from animal rights groups and shifting attitudes towards animal suffering. The paper takes an interdisciplinary approach between sociology and history, conducting a visual and discourse analysis of Vogue magazine. The data showcased that the animals deemed ‘acceptable’ to make fur coats changed across the 20th century, from the use of wild leopards towards the domestication of the mink. Across the century, the way Vogue discusses animals for fashion changes, and they gradually remove the obvious links to the use of animals. The shifts in fashion reveal wider cultural changes in non-human animal hierarchies and the increasing rejection of animal suffering in civilisation processes (Wouters, 2004). Alongside the exploration of animals used for fashion, this research also expands on how companion animals are presented in the magazine. The paper expands on the recent changes in how fur is advertised to women in the 21st century as a more sustainable alternative to ‘faux’ furs that use plastic-based materials. The contemporary work reveals how the fashion magazine navigates this tension under growing criticism towards fashion’s waste and harm to the environment. Overall, this work seeks to further understand how animals in fashion have been navigated through time.

Visualising Animal Housing: A Survey of Vernacular Animal Architecture in Archives

Natalie Lis, The University of Queensland, Australia

This paper illuminates challenges in writing human-animal vernacular architectural histories by surveying the prevalence of animal husbandry structures in the online catalogue of the National Archives of Australia. Architectural histories on animals are most frequently written on zoo enclosures, often because of the architects who designed them or the significance of the sites. Vernacular structures designed, built and used for animal husbandry or food production have traditionally not been subjects of study within the field of architectural history. However, there are many strategies in architectural analysis that may be used to productively reveal new spatial readings between vernacular husbandry structures, the animals that pass through these structures and the people who work within or around them. Yet, one problem with an architectural analysis is it depends on visual evidence such as drawings (plans, sections and elevations) or images that clarify materiality, scale and construction technique. Visual evidence in relationship to vernacular structures for animals is often poorly represented in archives. This survey compares the prevalence of animal husbandry structures for horses, pigs, camels, cows, sheep, goats and poultry in archives to gain understanding around which structures have better representation, and the possible reasons as to why.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ahg-seminar-mar-20th-tickets-707754732457