Thom van Dooren’s new book is an absolute must-read. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a beautifully written and evocative meditation on extinction. The book offers (and implicates us in) stories about five groups of birds – albatrosses, vultures, Little Penguins, whooping cranes, and Hawaiian crows – that build upon one another and collectively enable us to explore … Continue reading Flight Ways: An Interview
A new understanding of animals was central to how Japanese people redefined their place in the natural world in the nineteenth century. In his recent book, Ian Miller explores this transformation and its reverberations in a fascinating study of the emergence of an “ecological modernity” at the Ueno Zoo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We spoke about the book earlier this year, and you … Continue reading The Nature of the Beasts: An Interview
Mary Terrall’s new book is a beautifully-written, carefully-researched, and compellingly-argued account of the practices of natural history in the eighteenth-century francophone world. It is a must-read for historians of science, and as a bonus it also includes descriptions of frog pants, chickens wearing stockings, and mittens made of spider silk. You can find our conversation about it here. Continue reading Catching Nature in the Act: An Interview
I had a blast talking with Dominic Pettman recently about his two most recent books on humanity, animals, machines, and the relationships among them in the modern mediascape. You can find our conversation here. Continue reading Human Error/Look at the Bunny: An Interview
Barbara Ambros and I recently talked about her great new book on pet memorial rites in modern Japan. You can listen to our conversation here. Continue reading Bones of Contention: An Interview
Janice Neri and I recently talked about her beautiful new book on the imaging of insects in early modernity and its surprisingly wide-ranging consequences for understanding the history of science, art, and global exchange. You can find our conversation here. Continue reading The Insect and the Image: An Interview
The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and its Transformations in Early Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2009) The Monkey and the Inkpot introduces natural history in sixteenth century China through the iconic Bencao gangmu (Systematic materia medica) of Li Shizhen (1518–1593). The encyclopedic Bencao gangmu is widely lauded as a classic embodiment of pre-modern Chinese medical thought. This first book-length study in English of Li’s text reveals a “cabinet of curiosities” of … Continue reading The Monkey And the Inkpot
Carla Nappi 