Past events

2022

ShARC Ethics and Politics Seminar Series:
Jeff Sebo (NYU) presents The Moral Circle, commentary by Gary O’Brien

6 December 2022
Room 109, Elmfield Building, University of Sheffield and online via Google Meet

Reading group:
ShARC presents a reading group discussion of A First Rate Material' from Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata

21 November 2022
Online via Google Meet

Troy Vettese, ‘We Need to Talk About Kielbasa: The Left’s Problem with Meat’

8 November 2022
Alfred Denny Conference Room, University of Sheffield

Leigh Claire La Berge, ‘Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary’

27 October 2022 (cancelled due to illness - check back for rescheduled date)
Diamond, Lecture Theatre 8

Tom Tyler, ‘Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity: Book Launch’

20 October 2022
National Videogame Museum, Sheffield

Talks from Tom Tyler, Eva Giraud, and Peter Sands

Timo Müller (University of Konstanz), ‘Animal Aesthetics of Early Automobility’

17 October 2022
Blackboard

Katherine Ebury, ‘Animal Rights and Human Rights: A Law and Literature Approach to Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze’ (1892) and ‘The Case of Mr George Edalji’ (1907)’

21 September 2022
The Diamond, Lecture Theatre 8

Michael Lawrence, ‘Red Meat, Black Film: Beef, Crime and Desire in Film Noir’

4 May 2022
Alfred Denny Conference Room, University of Sheffield

In addition to Michael’s talk, there was also a Q&A session with Michael, led by Bob McKay. ShARC organised the event in partnership with SCRiF.

Rescheduled: ShARC Tales

12-13 May 2022
Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield

The symposium includes two keynote speakers, as well as two workshops:

1. “What is a PhD?” aimed towards UG and PGT students and led by current ShARC PGRs.

2. “What is a Postdoc?” aimed towards PGRs and led by current ShARC ECRs.

Blue Extinction

7-8 July 2022
University of Sheffield

Call for papers

2020

Half-day event, 28 April 2020 (cancelled due to covid-19)

ShARC's half-day event featuring three speakers.

With talks from: Siobhan O’Sullivan, Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales and host of the amazing Knowing Animals podcast; Angela Martin, political philosopher and PRIMA-Grant researcher at the University of Basel; and Robert Garner, professor of political theory (specialising in animal rights) at the University of Leicester.

Dolly Jørgensen, 21 April 2020 (cancelled due to covid-19)

A talk from environmental historian Dolly Jørgensen, Professor of History at the University of Stavanger.

2018

ShARC Tales

8-9 November 2018
Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield

The inaugural ShARC Tales Workshop.

Dr Helen Cowie, "Doing a Roaring Trade": Lion Taming in Nineteenth-Century Britain

17 April 2018
Firth Court FC-GO2

2016

Reading group:
Dinesh Wadiwel’s The War Against Animals

6 December 2016
9 Mappin Street, 9MS-G14

Research seminar:
Jill Atkins, 'Building an ark of emancipatory extinction prevention mechanisms of accounting and accountability'

29 November 2016
Diamond building DIA-WR1

British Animal Studies Network presents: Conserving (Conference)

18-19 November 2016
Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield

Plenary speakers:
Rosaleen Duffy (University of Sheffield); David Farrier (University of Edinburgh); Helen Tiffin (University of Wollongong)

Research seminar:
Sune Borkfelt, ‘Sensing the Animal in Slaughterhouse Fictions’

15 November 2016
Firth Court, Room F02a

Read the abstract

Research seminar:
Susan McHugh, ‘Honeybee Fictions and Indigenous Frictions’

18 October 2016
Hicks Building, Seminar Room F30

Research seminar:
Carrie Rohman, 'Isadora Duncan and the Creature in the Soul'

16 June 2016
Jessop West Seminar Room 8

Professor Carrie Rohman of Lafayette College is both a semi-professional dancer and one of the foremost scholars of literary animal studies; she has published widely, including her first monograph Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal and essays on Rebecca West, Rachel Rosenthal, J.M. Coetzee, Virgina Woolf and Italo Calvino.

Research seminar:
Mara-Daria Cojocaru, 'Bringing animals to the table: pragmatist animal ethics in least developed countries'

19 May 2016
The Diamond, Meeting Room 1

Research seminar:
Krithika Srinivasan, 'Cattle cultures in contemporary india'

12 May 2016
Jessop West Seminar Room 6

Research seminar:
Sue Vice and David Forrest, 'Beyond Kes: Barry Hine's Birds'

27 April 2016
The Diamond, Meeting Room 1

Research seminar:
Liz Tyson and Ahmad Safi (Palestinian Animal League), 'Activism under occupation: the unique challenges in seeking social justice in Palestine'

3 March 2016
Jessop West Seminar Room 7

Research seminar:
Alasdair Cochrane, 'Interspecies solidatiry: the case for labour rights for animals

25 February 2016
Jessop West Seminar Room 7

2014

Reading Animals

17–20 July, 2014
University of Sheffield

A major international English Studies conference focused on literary animal studies.

Keynote speakers at the conference were Tom Tyler, Erica Fudge, Laura Brown, Kevin Hutchings, Diana Donald, Cary Wolfe, and Susan McHugh.

Animal Machines: Animals and/as Technologies

Hosted at the University of Sheffield on 18th October, 2013, Animal Machines was a one-day interdisciplinary symposium to examine the interrelations of animals and technology, featuring contributions from literature, film, the social sciences, and information studies.

The pervasive association of animality and technicity is not only an ontological question but also structures various material and representational practices. Western philosophy has long struggled with this relation, particularly in the aftermath of Descartes’ famous assertion of the mechanistic essence of animality. The ethical and political dimensions of these ontological questions are brought into focus in concrete ways through the lived experience of both humans and nonhuman animals in their everyday embodied interaction with technologies.

Speakers

Anat Pick, Seán McCorry, Fabienne Collignon, Clara Mancini, Richard Twine, Robert McKay, John Miller, Matthew Cole, Emily Thew.

An archive of the symposium is available here.

The Animal Gaze Returned

The Animal Gaze returned was a major exhibition of contemporary animal-themed artworks, hosted at the Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery, Sheffield Hallam University, 2nd August – 2nd September, 2013.

You can view the photostream of the “The Animal Gaze Returned” exhibition on Flickr.

When you are caught in The Animal Gaze Returned, you will find that the fascination of animal worlds poses conceptual and ethical challenges to human priorities. Artists in this exhibition question the way humans look at animals, how animals return that look, and how this shapes human interactions with them; how people connect, and often don’t connect, with other beings.

In The Animal Gaze Returned, contemporary artists extend and complicate traditions in Fine Art by representing animals as more than objects of decoration or status. They use strategies that usurp conventions of anthropomorphic symbolism to recognize that animals’ visual presence – and ability to look – shape and are shaped by a wide variety of media, from painting, video and photography to sculpture and performance.

Artists

Suky Best, Olivier Richon, Andrea Roe, Bob and Roberta Smith, Rosemarie McGoldrick, Darren Harvey-Regan, Steve Baker, Lucy Powell, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, Ian Brown, Aurelia Mihai, Greta Alfaro, Cartwright and Jordan, Kathy High and Edwina Ashton.

Curators

Chloë Brown, artist, senior lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University,

Rosie McGoldrick, artist, senior lecturer in Fine Art at The CASS, London Metropolitan University and Dr. Robert McKay, writer and lecturer in English Literature at University of Sheffield.

An Animal Space

The exhibition An Animal Space took place in the Jessop West Building foyer at University of Sheffield from 2 August to 30 August. It displayed the early results of an ongoing collaboration between Chloë Brown and Robert McKay (curators of The Animal Gaze Returned), which brings the methods of contemporary art practice and literary criticism into conversation to reflect on human fascination by and use of other animals.

The exhibition combined sculpture, drawing and text and explores the connections, real and imaginary, between the photographic, material and textual traces of those animals who undertook early space flights, and the representation of such animals in postwar literary fiction. The works respond with empathy and playfulness to this history of dogs, spiders, mice and monkeys as astronauts (animalnauts?) and leave the viewer wondering — what flights of imagination are necessary to truly encounter animals in space? Also displayed as part of the exhibition, An Illustrated Theriography comprises high quality reproductions of jacket designs, illustrative quotations and exploratory annotations; it offers a visual record of the animal worlds presented in some of the most unusual and imaginative postwar literature.

A photostream archive of the exhibition is available on Flickr.