HIST 298 - Animal Histories

Taught by: Michael Wise

Content:

As a discipline, history is normally associated with human action and decision-making. This course takes a different approach by considering the role of nonhuman animals in creating what we call history. The course asks two main questions: how do animals affect historical transformations? And how do animals shape what historians write about in the past?

History, as we know it today, developed as a discipline during the late nineteenth century. Professional historians adopted a rigorous methodology of analyzing and interpreting written records left by human voices as a means of peering into the structures and contingencies of past societies. In the last fifty years, historians have begun to discover limitations of this archival method. Social historians have searched for supplemental modes in which to tell the stories of people who left no written records. Cultural historians, particularly specialists on topics like gender and sexuality, have had to pioneer new analytical frameworks for interpreting unrecorded acts and practices. Environmental historians have demonstrated the need to situate histories within broader changes in the material worlds that people inhabit.

Animal history draws on insight from theses (and other) major subfields of history to suggest that humans are probably just one of many species of historical authors. By paying close attention to the changing relationships between humans and other animals, historians have developed innovative histories of colonization, capitalism, globalization, and other significant transformations of the modern world. They have also encouraged a more open-minded, interdisciplinary, and agile use of historical evidence, pushing for a critical reflection of history’s disciplinary relationships with normative discourses of humanity and animality. What counts for a human or an animal has changed over time, and historians are themselves partly responsible for creating and concealing those changes.

The main goals of this course are for students to develop an understanding of the emerging field of animal history; to more firmly analyze how nonhuman actors have shaped historical transformations; and to more clearly interpret how ideas of human-animal difference have affected past, current, and potential changes in social, political, environmental, and cultural relationships. Organized thematically as a reading and lecture seminar, the course will be graded on a combination of class participation and written work.

Prerequisite: None

Semester Credits: 4

Meeting Times: MTWTh 1:20-3:20 p.m.