Talks
2022
The Animals in That Country - Q&A with Laura Jean McKay
26 April 2022
Video from the online Q&A.
2021
André Krebber, ‘Zoological Decolonizations of the European Subject’
19 October 2021
Virtual presentation hosted by Daniel Bowman and Christie Oliver-Hobley, University of Sheffield, UK
André Krebber is a lecturer and assistant professor in social and cultural history (human-animal studies) at the University of Kassel. His research interests span animal and environmental history; the history of knowledge, ideas and theory; the history of science and philosophy; theory and philosophy of history; critical theory; and aesthetics. Abstract for this talk is available on its event page.
Animal Studies in Focus 3 - Gemma Curto and Alice Higgs interview Eva Haifa Giraud and Catherine Oliver
1 July 2021
Eva Haifa Giraud has just joined the University of Sheffield as a senior lecturer in Digital Media and Society and is author of Veganism, Politics, Practice, and Theory (Bloomsbury, forthcoming July 2021). Catherine Oliver is a Research Associate on urban ecologies at the University of Cambridge and author of Veganism, Archives, and animals: Geographies of a Multispecies World (Routledge, forthcoming August 2021)
Host Gemma Curto and guest host Dr Alice Higgs ask Eva and Catherine about their new books, the theme is veganism and sustainability.
Editing and post-production by: Kitty Turner.
Music composed and performed by Kitty Turner.
Image: “Trio” by mripp is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Animal Studies in Focus 2 - Gemma Curto and Cecilia Tricker-Walsh interview Jemma Deer
30 June 2021
Dr Jemma Deer is a Researcher in Residence at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and author of Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020). Read more on her website
Host Gemma Curto and guest host Cecilia Tricker-Walsh ask Dr Deer about her book and her article entitled ‘Quenched: Five Fires for Thinking Extinction’ published in Oxford Literary Review (2019). They discuss extinction.
Editing and post-production by: Kitty Turner.
Music composed and performed by Kitty Turner.
Image: “Dinosaur Tracks!” by Disgwylfa is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Animal Studies in Focus 1 - Gemma Curto and Juliet de Little in Conversation
16 June 2021
This special episode of the ShARC Podcast: Animal Studies in Focus Series, sees host Gemma Curto (@GemmaCurto1), and guest Juliet de Little (@julietdelittle) discuss floodings, their impact on human and nonhuman animals relations and its representations in Mary Talbot and Bryan Talbot’s graphic novel Rain (2019).
Gemma Curto is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her research lies on interdisciplinary approaches to the relationship between literature, scientific methodologies and ecology. She has published an article in Green Letters on floods in biocentric graphic novels (2020). Juliet is a third year PhD student based across the school of Urban Studies and Management School at the University of Sheffield. Her research is concerned with what a climate just response to flooding in England might look like.
Materials discussed:
Mary Talbot and Bryan Talbot, Rain, (London: Penguin Random House, 2019)
Gemma Curto, ‘Floods in contemporary biocentric graphic novels’. Ed. Astrid Bracke and Katie Ritson. Spec. issue of Green Letters: studies in ecocriticism 24 no. 1. (2020), 6-22.
Juliet de Little, ‘Climate Justice and Flooding in England’ [Online Zine], Convivial Thinking, March 2021
Gemma Curto, ‘Chaotics of time in econarratives: from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) to Richard McGuire’s Here (2014)’, PhD thesis (in progress)
Juliet de Little, ‘Climate justice and flooding in England’, PhD thesis (in progress)
Editing and post-production by: Kitty Turner.
Music composed and performed by Kitty Turner.
Photograph: “A lone armadillo moves across a flooded roadway in Booth, Texas on Wednesday, June 1, 2016. Micharl Ciaglo/Houston Chronicle
2019
Lucinda Cole, ‘Plagues, Poisons, Dead Rats: In Search of A Medical Posthumanities’
This is a talk by Lucinda Cole (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), delivered as part of ShARC’s Animal Remains conference (2019).
Anglo-European history is full of failed attempts to eradicate increasingly global rat populations - often through poisons - in the name of human health. Even before being identified as vectors for bubonic plague in the late nineteenth century, rats were regarded as “vermin” and marked for death. Focusing on shipboard rats in literature and natural philosophy, Lucinda Cole traces some of this history, and considers the possibility of a multispecies, ecological approach to our real and imagined “vermin problem.”
Thom van Dooren, ‘Moving Birds in Hawai’i: Assisted colonisation in a colonised land’
This is a talk by Thom van Dooren (University of Sydney), delivered as part of ShARC’s Animal Remains conference (2019).
In September 2011, a delicate cargo of 24 Nihoa Millerbirds was carefully loaded by conservationists onto a ship for a three-day voyage to Laysan Island in the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. The goal of this translocation was to establish a second population of this endangered species, an “insurance population” in the face of the mounting pressures of climate change and potential new biotic arrivals. But the millerbird, or ulūlu in Hawaiian, is just one of many avian species to become the subject of this kind of “assisted colonisation.”
In Hawai’i, and around the world, recent years have seen a broad range of efforts to safeguard species by finding them homes in new places. Thinking through the ulūlu project, this lecture explores the challenges and possibilities of assisted colonisation in a colonised land.
What does it mean to move birds in the context of the long, and ongoing, history of dispossession of the Kānaka Maoli, the Native Hawaiian people? How are distinct but entangled process of colonisation, of unworlding, at work in the lives of both people and birds? Ultimately, this lecture explores how these diverse colonisations might be understood and told responsibly in an era of escalating loss and extinction.