The emergent discipline of Animal Studies looks both to complicate the ways in which the demarcation between human and animal worlds has been achieved, maintained, enacted, and performed throughout history and to explore the ways in which animals and the human-animal relationship have been represented in discursive formations from the premodern fable to early cinema, Modernist literature, and most recently, televisual representations of wildlife such as National Geographic’s “Crittercam.” This working group will investigate the recent turn towards de-centering the humanist assumptions upon which much Western philosophical thought since Descartes has operated and explore the ways in which it allows us to reconceive the role of animals in philosophical, cultural, and literary history.
Please contact Rasheed Tazudeen at r.tazudeen@gmail.com for more information or to join the group.
