HAS Courses in History
Ball State University
Abel Alves
A History of Animals in the Atlantic World
The anthropologist Claude L�©vi-Strauss once wrote that animals are not only â��good to eat,â�� they are â��good to think.â�� Throughout the course of human history, people have interacted with other animals, not only using them for food, clothing, labor and entertainment, but also associating with them as pets and companions, and even appreciating their behaviors intrinsically. Nonhuman animals have been our symbols and models, and they have even channeled the sacred for us. This course will explore the interaction of humans with other animals in the context of the Atlantic World from prehistoric times to the present. Our case studies will include an exploration of our early hominid heritage as prey as well as predators; our domestication of other animals to fit our cultural needs; how nonhuman animals were used and sometimes respected in early agrarian empires like those of Rome and the Aztecs; how Native American, African and Christian religious traditions have wrestled with the concept of the â��animalâ��; the impact of the Enlightenment and Darwinian thought; and the contemporary mechanization of life and call for animal rights. Throughout the semester, we will be giving other animals â��voice,â�� even as Aristotle in The Politics said they possessed the ability to communicate. We will also explore who we are as a unique species and what we share with other animals.
California State University Long Beach
Brett Mizelle
Human Animal Relationships in Historical Perspective
This seminar on the literature of history is designed to engage with a wide-range of scholarship on the history of the relationships between human and non-human animals. This literature, sometimes grouped under the rubric "animal studies" (a term that, as we will see, comes with its own problems), emerged as a subset of social, cultural, and environmental history, although parallel inquiries into the human use and "thinkability" of non-human animals were occurring in anthropology, literary studies, and the biological sciences. Much of the work in this emergent interdisciplinary field has been, like the social and cultural history before it, connected to larger social movements, many of relatively recent vintage. The term "speciesism"-used to connote prejudice against non-human animals similar in kind to racism and sexism-was only coined in 1970, for example, when there was a renewed interest in the idea of animal protection and animal rights. In this seminar we will trace the rise of interest in the welfare of animals and the subsequent shift toward the idea that non-human animals may deserve some of the same moral and legal considerations typically extended to humans. In the process, we will necessarily interrogate the relationship between the past and the present, which explains why several of our readings and texts are not traditional historical monographs.
Columbia University
Samuel Moyn
Animals from Aristotle to Agamben
This class is a reading survey about how the Western philosophical and theological tradition has conceptualized the difference between humans and (other) animals. Are humans animals? (What are animals, first of all?) If humans are animals, how to conceptualize their differences? Either way, what are the consequences for how to understand oneself and treat animals? What is the nature of human dignity, and does it depend on some plausible distinction of humans from animals? The course culminates in six prominent contemporary philosophers who have turned the traditions they have inherited towards the problem of animals. (Note: this is not a class about animal rights except indirectly, insofar as the question of whether rights might or might not accrue to animals will depend on a prior study of the status of the human-animal border.)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Harriet Ritvo
Introduction to Environmental History
Focusing primarily on the period since 1500, explores the influence of climate, topography, plants, animals, and microorganisms on human history and the reciprocal influence of people on the environment. Topics include the European encounter with the Americas, the impact of modern technology, and the historical roots of the current environmental crisis.
Michigan State University
Linda Kalof
Animals and Social Transformations
This course is an historical overview of the cultural relationship between humans and other animals and how those relationships have changed with changing social conditions. Both visual imagery and extracts from historical and literary sources will be used to experience the human-animal story throughout history. The course draws on a wealth of information about the animal-human relationship, covering a range of topics rarely discussed in animal cultural studies, such as the Black Plague, dead animal portraiture and animal rituals that reflect hierarchies of gender, race and class, including the medieval backwards ride, horning ceremonies and animal massacres. The course is open to all interested graduate students in the university.
Michigan State University/Lyman Briggs College
Georgina Montgomery
Animal Histories
This course will analyze the various ways in which human society understands and interacts with wildlife. Human/animal relationships will be examined in a range of physical locations, including the laboratory, field, national park and zoo, and in a range of cultural and social settings. Within these various contexts we will examine how humans relate to animals, how these relationships have been defined and represented, and the consequences of these relationships for human identity.
Montana State University
Brett Walker
Animal Histories
This course is designed to investigate the interrelationship between human and nonhuman animals in comparative historical settings, ones elucidated through the interdisciplinary approach of science, technology, cultural studies, and straight history. Increasingly, historians have begun to investigate the role of nonhuman animals in shaping human history and, even more intriguingly, the potential for nonhumans to experience and generate histories of their own. This course offers an opportunity to participate in this pioneering field of inquiry. From the calories that fuel our society to the large predators that continue to haunt our collective imaginations, nonhumans directly participate in and shape our histories, cultures, and ecologies.
Northeastern University
Clay McShane
History of Human-Animal Relations
Northwestern University
Susan Pearson
The Human Animal Relationship in Historical Perspective
This course will examine the problems and possibilities of studying the human-animal relationship in historical perspective. Building on recent scholarship, we will consider how animals have served as symbols in human culture, as raw material for human industry, and as companions in human lives.
State University of New York
Dorothee Brantz
Animals in History
State University of New York
Dorothee Brantz
Nature and the Environment in Comparative Perspective
University of California, Santa Barbara
Anita Guerrini
History of Animal Use in Science
Using a variety of sources, this course will explore the ways humans have thought about and used animals in science and medicine from the seventeenth century to the present. How has science constructed the boundaries between humans and animals, and what have the consequences been for each?
University of Washington
MarÃ�Âa Elena GarcÃ�Âa
Animals: Articulating human and non-human struggles
How are animal rights and feminist movements connected? Does eating meat perpetuate notions of patriarchy? Can we successfully challenge the exploitation of human beings without also fighting for the rights of non-human animals? Can we morally distinguish between human and non-human exhibitionism? How do notions of class structure our choices about eating habits? This course explores some ethical, political, and cultural questions regarding animals, or as philosopher Peter Singer calls them, non-human animals. Specifically, it looks at the cultural production of difference between humans and non-humans, as well as the tactics, strategies, and ideologies behind animal rights movements. Drawing on debates in anthropology, philosophy, literature, and politics, this course invites students to interrogate the discourses and practices that reduce animals to "inferior beings." The class also asks students to critically examine their own relationships with animals, to explore cultural debates about animals and the environment, vegetarianism, the industrial food complex, health, zoos, and animal experimentation (among other topics), and to think about the discourse of "rights" more concretely. Moreover, this seminar will emphasize the significance of the animal rights movement and its connections to other global movements for cultural, social and environmental justice.
University of Washington
MarÃ�Âa Elena GarcÃ�Âa
Animals in Global Perspectives
This course examines the multiple ways in which animals have entered transnational flows through the international economy of food and development programs, and the transnational movement around animal rights. The globalization of the "factory farm" model of production has implications for human and non-human animal lives as the epidemics of "mad cow" disease, avian flu, and "swine" flu have recently and dramatically demonstrated. While these diseases are often seen as separate to the "normal" workings of international political economies, this seminar will explore how they have emerged in and through the processes of industrialization and globalization. Students will also examine the implications of development programs that place "traditional animals" at the center of new strategies to confront poverty in many parts of the developing world. We will engage this new development literature and ask what the cultural and economic implications of this process are for local communities who often value animals for religious and social reasons that are incommensurable with the metrics of international development. Finally, students will explore the ethical and moral debates that have emerged under the rubrics of animal rights and animal welfare. While this debate has largely been seen as a "First World" phenomenon, this course will look at how concerns for the lives of non-human animals have been expressed by local communities and activists in a global context. Taking animals as the proverbial "fish in the water," this course seeks to complicate and de-naturalize the common sense understandings that make non-human animals an all too invisible part of world politics.
University of Washington
MarÃ�Âa Elena GarcÃ�Âa
Suffering: Animals, Violence, and the Consequences of Silence.
This advanced seminar invites students to engage intellectually with the idea and experiences of suffering. How do we think about suffering and, perhaps more importantly, how do we not think about it? Reviewing philosophical, cultural, and social questions about the nature of pain and violence, this course pays special attention to the suffering of non-human animals. In the United States, approximately 10 billion animals are killed each year in the food industry alone, although this does not include fish or other sea animals. Throughout the world, millions of animals are used in illegal fighting and trafficking circles, used in medical experiments, and killed in harrowing ways for their fur and skin. The pain and suffering that these and other animals endure in life, and during the process of death, is mostly hidden from public view. Do we consider the fate of pigs, chinchillas, or mice, in the same way that we think about the dogs or cats with whom we share a home? How do humans make decisions about the relative importance (and non-importance) of the suffering of particular animals? What are the consequences of those decisions?
York University
Matthew Brower
Envision Animals: Animals and Visual Culture
This course deals with the role of visual depictions of animals in aesthetic, activist, environmental and biological contexts. It explores the role of imagery in constituting contemporary and historical conceptions of animality. The course objectives are to develop an understanding of the importance of imagery in human-animal relations.
