Animal Studies Working Group
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
Mediating Natures Working Group
"Mediating Natures" is a Townsend Center for the Humanities reading group. Our aim is to critically explore figurations of the environment employed by literary, scientific, and socio-political discourses. By taking seriously the relation between material and fictional ecologies, we propose an interdisciplinary examination of how relations between humans and nonhumans are negotiated. We invite students and scholars from all disciplines to attend our meetings.