New Books in Animal Studies

Christina M. García, "Corporeal Readings of Cuban Literature and Art: The Body, the Inhuman, and Ecological Thinking" (U Florida Press, 2024)

28 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Christina M. García’s book, Corporeal Readings of Cuban Literature and Art: The Body, the Inhuman, and Ecological Thinking (University Press of ...

Jane Hamlett and Julie-Marie Strange, "Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life" (Reaktion Books, 2023)

23 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life (Reaktion, 2023) by Dr. Jane Hamlett & Dr. Julie-Marie Strange tracks the British love ...

Carl Zimmer, "Life's Edge: The Search For What it Means to be Alive" (Dutton, 2022)

10 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the appl...

Kenneth R. Valpey, "Cow Care in Hindu Animal Ethics" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

30 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What does cow care in India have to offer modern Western discourse animal ethics? Why are cows treated with such reverence in the Indian context? Join...

Andil Gosine, "Nature's Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean" (Duke UP, 2021)

29 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Nature's Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (Duke UP, 2021), Andil Gosine engages with questions of humanism, queer theory, and animality ...

Jane Hamlett and Julie-Marie Strange, "Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life" (Reaktion Books, 2023)

23 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life (Reaktion Books, 2023) tracks the British love affair with pets over the last two centu...

Charis Enns and Brock Bersaglio, "Settler Ecologies: The Enduring Nature of Settler Colonialism in Kenya" (U Toronto Press, 2024)

20 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Settler Ecologies: The Enduring Nature of Settler Colonialism in Kenya (University of Toronto Press, 2024) tells the story of how settler colonialis...

Animals

08 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of High Theory, Mackenzie Cooley talks about animals. The animal lies at the center of science and the human, from imperial conquest a...

Christopher Michael Blakley, "Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World" (Louisiana State UP, 2023)

08 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Historians of early America, slavery, early African American history, the history of science, and environmental history have interrogated the complex ...

Paul Hansen, "Hokkaido Dairy Farm: Cosmopolitics of Otherness and Security on the Frontiers of Japan" (SUNY Press, 2024)

03 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As an ethnography of a Japanese dairy farm while having theoretical values going beyond the specific context, Hokkaido Dairy Farm: Cosmopolitics of O...

Dinesh Wadiwel, "Animals and Capital" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

19 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the 20th century, capitalist animal agriculture emerged with a twofold mission: to ruthlessly exploit animals for their labour time and enlarge hum...

John O’Connor, "The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster" (Sourcebooks, 2024)

16 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Bigfoot is an instantly recognizable figure. Through the decades, this elusive primate has been featured in movies and books, on coffee mugs, beer koo...

Cristina Brito, "Humans and Aquatic Animals in Early Modern America and Africa" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)

04 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Cristina Brito's book Humans and Aquatic Animals in Early Modern America and Africa (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) deals with peoples' practices...

Fynn Holm, "The Gods of the Sea: Whales and Coastal Communities in Northeast Japan, c.1600-2019" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

29 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Japan is often imagined as a nation with a long history of whaling. In The Gods of the Sea: Whales and Coastal Communities in Northeast Japan, c.1600...

Rob Percival, "The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat" (Pegasus, 2022)

12 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Our future diet will be shaped by diverse forces. It will be shaped by novel technologies, by geopolitical tensions, and the evolution of cultural pre...

Yamini Narayanan, "Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India" (Stanford UP, 2023)

11 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

India imposes stringent criminal penalties, including life imprisonment in some states, for cow slaughter, based on a Hindu ethic of revering the cow ...

Joshua Paul Dale, "Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired our Brains and Conquered the World" (Profile Books, 2023)

10 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Why are some things cute, and others not? What happens to our brains when we see something cute? And how did cuteness go global, from Hello Kitty to D...

Marcia Stephenson, "Llamas beyond the Andes: Untold Histories of Camelids in the Modern World" (U Texas Press, 2023)

27 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Camelids are vital to the cultures and economies of the Andes. The animals have also been at the heart of ecological and social catastrophe: Europeans...

Melanie Joy, "How to End Injustice Everywhere" (Lantern, 2023)

08 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this eye-opening and compelling work, psychologist Melanie Joy reveals the common denominator driving all forms of injustice. The mentality that dr...

Thom van Dooren, "The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds" (Columbia UP, 2019)

06 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Crows can be found almost everywhere that people are, from tropical islands to deserts and arctic forests, from densely populated cities to suburbs an...

Leigh Claire La Berge, "Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary" (Duke UP, 2023)

05 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

At the outset of Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary (Duke UP, 2023), Leigh Claire La Berge declares that “all history is the history of cat struggl...

Marcy Norton, "The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492" (Harvard UP, 2024)

04 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 (Harvard University Press, 2024), Dr. Marcy Norton offers a dramatic new interpretation of t...

Martha C. Nussbaum, "Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility" (Simon & Schuster, 2022)

02 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A revolutionary new theory and call to action on animal rights, ethics, and law from the renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum.  Animals are in tro...

Justin Marceau, "Beyond Cages: Animal Law and Criminal Punishment" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

31 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

For all the diversity of views within the animal protection movement, there is a surprising consensus about the need for more severe criminal justice ...

Helen Louise Cowie, "Victims of Fashion: Animal Commodities in Victorian Britain" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

21 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Animal products were used extensively in nineteenth-century Britain. A middle-class Victorian woman might wear a dress made of alpaca wool, drape hers...

Jonathan B. Losos, "The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa" (Viking, 2023)

20 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The domestic cat--your cat--has, from its evolutionary origins in Africa, been transformed in comparatively little time into one of the most successf...

Shelly Kagan, "How to Count Animals, More Or Less" (Oxford UP, 2019)

06 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Most people agree that animals count morally, but how exactly should we take animals into account? A prominent stance in contemporary ethical discussi...

Samiparna Samanta, "Meat, Mercy, Morality: Animals and Humanitarianism in Colonial Bengal, 1850-1920" (Oxford UP, 2021)

02 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Meat, Mercy, and Morality: Animals and Humanitarianism in Colonial Bengal, 1850-1920 (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Samiparna Samanta disenta...

Anne Mendelson, "Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood" (Columbia UP, 2023)

22 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Why is cows' milk, which few nonwhite people can digest, promoted as a science-backed dietary necessity in countries where the majority of the populat...

Gary Tomlinson, "The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning" (Zone Books, 2023)

14 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

What is meaning? How does it arise? Where is it found in the world? In recent years, philosophers and scientists have answered these questions in diff...

James K. Beggan, "How Our Love of Dogs Creates Social Conflict" (Lexington Books, 2022)

03 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

For the last twenty-thousand years, dogs and people have shared a unique bond in the animal kingdom. In How Our Love of Dogs Creates Social Conflict ...

Shark Sciences: A Conversation with Carlee Jackson

26 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Today’s book is Minorities in Shark Sciences: Diverse Voices in Shark Research (CRC Press, 2022), edited by Jasmin Graham, Camila Caceres and Debo...

Oil Beach - How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life: A Conversation with Christina Dunbar-Hester

09 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Christina Dunbar-Hester, professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, talks about her rec...

Kendra Coulter, "Defending Animals: Finding Hope on the Front Lines of Animal Protection" (MIT Press, 2023)

08 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Beloved dogs and cats. Magnificent horses and mountain gorillas. Curious chickens. What do we actually do to protect animals from harm—and is it eno...

Sharon Patricia Holland, "an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life" (Duke UP, 2023)

07 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In an other: a black feminist examination of animal life (Duke UP, 2023), Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divi...

Naisargi N. Davé, "Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being" (Duke UP, 2023)

03 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being (Duke UP, 2023), Naisargi N. Davé examines the complex worlds of animalists and animalism in ...

Kevin J. Mitchell, "Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will" (Princeton UP, 2023)

01 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Scientists are learning more and more about how brain activity controls behavior and how neural circuits weigh alternatives and initiate actions. As w...

Jamie L. Jones, "Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling" (UNC Press, 2023)

26 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Through the mid-nineteenth century, the US whaling industry helped drive industrialization and urbanization, providing whale oil to lubricate and illu...

Michelle K. Berry, "Cow Talk: Work, Ecology, and Range Cattle Ranchers in the Postwar Mountain West" (U Oklahoma Press, 2023)

26 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

How did ranching become an identity? University of Arizona historian Michelle Berry explains in Cow Talk: Work, Ecology, and Western Ranchers in the...

A Better Way to Buy Books

12 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has alre...

Ryan Tucker Jones, "Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

09 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The Soviet Union killed over six hundred thousand whales in the twentieth century, many of them illegally and secretly. That catch helped bring many w...

Sarah Clegg, "Women's Lore: 4,000 Years of Sirens, Serpents and Succubi" (Apollo, 2023)

02 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Creatures like Lilith, the seductive first wife of Adam, and mermaids, who lured sailors to their death, are familiar figures in the genre of monstrou...

Ian Convery et al., "Routledge Handbook of Rewilding" (Routledge, 2022)

20 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Routledge Handbook of Rewilding (Routledge, 2022) provides a comprehensive overview of the history, theory and current practices of ‘rewilding’....

Steve Nicholls, "Alien Worlds: How Insects Conquered the Earth, and Why Their Fate Will Determine Our Future" (Princeton UP, 2023)

15 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Life on Earth depends on the busy activities of insects, but global populations of these teeming creatures are currently under threat, with grave cons...

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, "From the Pandemic to Utopia: The Future Begins Now" (Routledge, 2023)

11 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The coronavirus pandemic forces us to rethink our contemporaneity. It has brought to the surface dimensions of human fragility that partially contradi...

Benjamin Meiches, "Nonhuman Humanitarians: Animal Interventions in Global Politics" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)

07 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Both critical and mainstream scholarly work on humanitarianism have largely been framed from anthropocentric perspectives highlighting humanity as the...

Richard C. Hoffmann, "The Catch: An Environmental History of Medieval European Fisheries" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

07 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The Catch: An Environmental History of Medieval European Fisheries (Cambridge UP, 2023) provides a comprehensive examination of European engagement w...

Sillies: Horses

07 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In our new summer series of “Sillies,” Saronik and Kim ask each other how simple things will achieve the grandiose task of saving the world. In th...

Arin Greenwood, "Your Robot Dog Will Die" (Soho, 2019)

31 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Today I talked to Arin Greenwood about her new book Your Robot Dog Will Die (Soho, 2019). When a global genetic experiment goes awry and canines sto...

Tom Mustill, "How to Speak Whale: A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication" (Grand Central Publishing, 2022)

13 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

What if animals and humans could speak to one another? Tom Mustill—the nature documentarian who went viral when a thirty‑ton humpback whale breach...

The Future of Oceans: A Discussion with Chris Armstrong

03 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Amidst all the talk of a green revolution what about the blue stuff? There are the seas that will wash over inhabited land, there’s the sea economy ...

The Killer Whale Journals: Our Love and Fear of Orcas

29 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Like wolves, orcas have been loved and loathed throughout history. What created this complicated relationship between humans and whales? And have we c...

Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa, "The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life" (U California Press, 2023)

18 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life (U of California Press, 2023), Benjamín Schultz‑Figueroa examines rarely seen b...

Josh Milburn, "Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully" (Oxford UP, 2023)

15 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

How would we eat if animals had rights? A standard assumption is that our food systems would be plant-based. But maybe we should reject this assumptio...

Selcen Küçüküstel, "Embracing Landscape: Living with Reindeer and Hunting among Spirits in South Siberia" (Berghahn, 2021)

22 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Examining human-animal relations among the reindeer hunting and herding Dukha community in northern Mongolia, Embracing Landscape: Living with Reinde...

Eva Haifa Giraud, "What Comes After Entanglement?: Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion" (Duke UP, 2019)

05 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

By foregrounding the ways that human existence is bound together with the lives of other entities, contemporary cultural theorists have sought to move...

Christina Dunbar-Hester, "Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

27 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

How can we stop infrastructure from damaging the planet? In Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond...

Wendy Lynne Lee, "This is Environmental Ethics: An Introduction" (John Wiley & Sons, 2022)

26 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Wendy Lynne Lee's This is Environmental Ethics: An Introduction (John Wiley & Sons, 2022) provides students and scholars with a comprehensive introd...

The Promise of Multispecies Justice

21 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

How might we imagine justice in times of ecological harm? How are human struggles for social justice entangled with the lives of other beings includin...

Rachel Robison-Greene, "Edibility and in Vitro Meat: Ethical Considerations" (Lexington Books, 2022)

21 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Consumers and policy makers have unprecedented choices to make in the years to come about how and what we eat. If we continue down our current path of...

What Do Bees, Ants, and Dragonflies Get up to All Day?

13 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Bugs are everywhere: in every corner of the world, even the Artic. But of the estimated 10 million species of bugs worldwide, only a million have been...

David Baumeister, "Kant on the Human Animal: Anthropology, Ethics, Race" (Northwestern UP, 2022)

12 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

While Immanuel Kant’s account of human reason is well known and celebrated, his account of human animality (Thierheit) is virtually unknown. Animali...

Brian Kateman, "Meat Me Halfway" (Prometheus Books, 2022)

12 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

We know that eating animals is bad for the planet and bad for our health, and yet we do it anyway. Ask anyone in the plant-based movement and the solu...

Thomas M. Lekan, "Our Gigantic Zoo: A German Quest to Save the Serengeti" (Oxford UP, 2020)

11 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

How did the Serengeti become an internationally renowned African conservation site and one of the most iconic destinations for a safari? In Our Gigan...

Christopher J. Preston, "Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife Recoveries That Change How We Think about Animals" (MIT Press, 2023)

08 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The news about wildlife is dire—more than 900 species have been wiped off the planet since industrialization. Against this bleak backdrop, however, ...

David Rothenberg, "Whale Music: Thousand Mile Songs in a Sea of Sound" (Terra Nova Press, 2023)

04 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Whale song is an astonishing world of sound whose existence no one suspected before the 1960s. Its discovery has forced us to confront the possibility...

Elizabeth Marshall, "Wolves in Beowulf and Other Old English Texts" (Boydell & Brewer, 2022)

02 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Two perceptions about wolves are inherited from ancient and medieval European lupine motifs: the superstition that the wolf could steal a person's spe...

The Transformation of Livestock Herding in Socialist Mongolia

31 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Between 1956 and 1960, leaders in the Mongolian People’s Republic embarked on a collectivization campaign to change the way in which Mongolians inte...

John Soderberg, "Animals and Sacred Bodies in Early Medieval Ireland: Religion and Urbanism at Clonmacnoise" (Lexington Books, 2021)

24 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Clonmacnoise was among the busiest, most economically complex, and intensely sacred places in early medieval Ireland. In Animals and Sacred Bodies in...

Nomadic Pastoralism Among the Mongol Herders

14 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Nomadic Pastoralism among the Mongol Herders: Multispecies and Spatial Ethnography in Mongolia and Transbaikalia (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) ...

Jan Harrison's “Animal Tongues”

09 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Artist Jan Harrison's work explores the connections between human and animal psyches and takes the form of painting, pastel, sculpture, and performanc...

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, "What We Fed to the Manticore" (Tin House Books, 2022)

04 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Through nine emotionally vivid stories, all narrated from animal perspectives, Talia Lakshmi Kolluri’s debut collection explores themes of environme...

Philippe Schlenker, "What It All Means: Semantics for (Almost) Everything" (MIT Press, 2022)

25 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In What It All Means: Semantics for (Almost) Everything (MIT Press, 2022), Philippe Schlenker takes readers on tour of meaning, from the animal king...

Sara Petrosillo, "Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture" (Ohio State UP, 2023)

12 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Fantastic and informative talk with Sara Petrosillo of the University of Evansville about her new book, Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control ...

Corey Lee Wrenn, "Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain's First Colony" (SUNY Press, 2021)

28 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Irish vegan studies are poised for increasing relevance as climate change threatens the legitimacy and longevity of animal agriculture and widespread ...

Justin Gregg, "If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity" (Little, Brown, 2022)

26 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

What if human intelligence is actually more of a liability than a gift? After all, the animal kingdom, in all its diversity, gets by just fine without...

Samantha Muka, "Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft and the Sciences of the Sea" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

04 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft and the Sciences of the Sea (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Samantha Muka, Assistant Professor of Science, Te...

John P. Gluck, "Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals: A Primate Scientist's Ethical Journey" (U Chicago Press, 2016)

03 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The National Institute of Health recently announced its plan to retire the fifty remaining chimpanzees held in national research facilities and place ...

Jason Ananda Josephson Storm, "Metamodernism: The Future of Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

12 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

For decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous cat...

Annika A. Culver, "Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

09 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Annika Culver’s Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology (Bloomsbury Academic 2022) uses a previously unava...

Ayelet Zohar, "The Curious Case of the Camel in Modern Japan: (De)Colonialism, Orientalism, and Imagining Asia" (Brill, 2022)

07 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Ayelet Zohar’s The Curious Case of the Camel in Modern Japan: (De)Colonialism, Orientalism, and Imagining Asia (Brill, 2022) traces the use of ca...

Margret Grebowicz, "Rescue Me: On Dogs and Their Humans" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)

06 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Margret Grebowicz's Rescue Me: On Dogs and Their Humans (U Minnesota Press, 2022) is a little book about the oldest relationship we humans have cult...

Melanie Joy, "The Vegan Matrix: Understanding and Discussing Privilege Among Vegans to Build a More Inclusive and Empowered Movement" (Lantern, 2020)

02 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

A short guidebook to understanding and discussing privilege among vegans and vegan organizations in the wake of #metoo, including how to establish acc...

94 Elizabeth Kolbert on the Nature of the Future (GT, JP, NS, HY)

01 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

How should humans respond to our ongoing human-made climate catastrophe? To answer that question, Recall this Book turned to prize-winning climate r...

Laura Jean McKay, "The Animals in that Country" (Scribe US, 2022)

18 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, I talk to Dr. Laura Jean McKay about her award-winning novel The Animals in that Country (Scribe US, 2020). Hard-drinking, foul-mou...

Anita Guerrini, "Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Aristotle to CRISPR" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022)

16 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Experimentation on animals—particularly humans—is often assumed to be a uniquely modern phenomenon. But the ideas and attitudes that encourage bio...

Alan Shuback, "Hollywood at the Races: Film's Love Affair with the Turf" (UP of Kentucky, 2019)

15 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Today I talked to Alan Shuback about his book Hollywood at the Races: Film's Love Affair with the Turf (UP of Kentucky, 2019) A love of the slapsti...

Karen Bakker, "The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants" (Princeton UP, 2022)

11 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The natural world teems with remarkable conversations, many beyond human hearing range. Scientists are using groundbreaking digital technologies to un...

Thom van Dooren, "A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions" (MIT Press, 2022)

07 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In this time of extinctions, the humble snail rarely gets a mention. And yet snails are disappearing faster than any other species. In A World in a S...

Mackenzie Cooley, "The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

31 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The Renaissance is celebrated for the belief that individuals could fashion themselves to greatness, but there is a dark undercurrent to this fêted e...

Red Cat

31 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of High Theory, Leigh Claire La Berge talks about red cats: communist cats, revolutionary tigers, radical felines of all stripes. The ...

Halloween Special: Alice Walker’s Cat

28 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Saronik tells Kim about Alice Walker’s book Anything We Love Can Be Saved, where she talks about her many cats over the years, and how they represe...

Halloween Special: Jacques Derrida’s Cat

27 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Saronik talks with Kim about Jacques Derrida’s cat. Derrida writes about his cat, who makes him rather anxious, in “The Animal That Therefore I Am...

Halloween Special: Michel de Montaigne’s Cat

24 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In part one of our Halloween Special on Cats, Kim talks with John Guilliory about Montaigne’s essay “An Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Montaigne a...

Saheed Aderinto, "Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria" (Ohio UP, 2022)

10 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

With this multispecies study of animals as instrumentalities of the colonial state in Nigeria, Saheed Aderinto argues that animals, like humans, were ...

Emelia Quinn, "Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan, 1818 to Present" (Oxford UP, 2021)

06 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan, 1818 to Present (Oxford UP, 2021) focuses on the iteration of the trope of ‘the monstrous vegan’ across 2...

John Saeki, "The Last Tigers of Hong Kong: True Stories of Big Cats That Stalked the Hills Beyond the City" (Blacksmith Books, 2021)

06 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Most Hong Kong residents nowadays only have to worry about a wandering boar or an aggressive monkey in their day-to-day lives. But for much of its...

Natalie J. Goodison, "Introducing the Medieval Swan" (U Wales Press, 2022)

04 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

What comes to mind when we think of swans? Likely their beauty in domestic settings, their preserved status, their association with royalty, and possi...

NBN Classic: Peter Singer, "Why Vegan?: Eating Ethically" (Liveright, 2020)

02 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. Even before the publication of...

Beyond Meat? Dietary Shifts and Meat Contestations in China, India and Vietnam

30 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

What explains the uneven meatification of diets in three of Asia’s core ‘emerging economies’? How and why is meat consumption changing today, an...