A syllabus for an undergraduate animal studies course.

This essay offers a short story about long distance trade during the “global” middle ages. It emerges as a response to two seemingly unrelated puzzles: one, the role of walrus ivory in the Norse Atlantic economy; the other, the origins of a mysterious material known in Arabic sources as khutu. Although debated within distinct specializations, the…[Read more]

including readings of Joseph McElroy, Tolkien, Norman Rush, Sartre, and others

on vivisection at Ryerson University, and academic freedom

review of Andrew F. Smith, A Critique of the Moral Defense of Vegetarianism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

on systems intelligence, foundations of math, and else

on animals in literature, film

The promulgation of pollution control regulations governing factory farms has led to a striking new way of representing and intervening in the bodies of farmed animals: the body is being represented as a source of pollution, and various technological interventions, from genetic engineering to dietary changes, are being deployed to reduce pollution…[Read more]

This article examines Farm Sanctuary’s failed effort to save the Enviropigs. In the Spring of 2012, after losing the main source of funding for its Enviropig project, the University of Guelph, in Ontario, Canada, killed the last sixteen members of this line of transgenic pigs, despite Farm Sanctuary’s offer to place them in permanent homes. The…[Read more]

An examination of taxonomic bias in the field of animal studies.

Roadkill is disgusting. Many people just want it removed from the roads as quickly as possible, and they don’t care where it goes. In Pennsylvania, most of the deer carcasses that are collected from the roads end up in landfills. But is this a respectful way to treat the dead? And what about the vultures and other scavengers who would otherwise e…[Read more]

Readers are often left baffled by the bizarre retribution Marie de France’s werewolf protagonist inflicts upon his treacherous wife: why bite off her nose, specifically? Though critics have offered a range of interpretations for the wife’s punishment in Marie’s lai, approaching the significance of noselessness from a dog’s perspective may deepe…[Read more]

The essays in this interdisciplinary volume explore language, broadly construed, as part of the continued interrogation of the boundaries of human and nonhuman animals in the Middle Ages. Uniting a diverse set of emerging and established scholars, Animal Languages questions the assumed medieval distinction between humans and other animals. The…[Read more]

The debate over whether the creation of the New Model Army represented continuity or change in the supply systems of parliamentarian armies has suffered from a lack of detailed research on the Earl of Essex’s army. This article begins to redress the balance by examining the supply of horses and saddles to the armies of Essex, Manchester, Waller, a…[Read more]

Speculation about how the social history of early-modern England could be made more sophisticated by including animals.

South African novelist and essayist Olive Schreiner interpreted South African racial and class categories for British readers in an effort to prevent what she worried would be bloody conflict between Boers and indigenous Africans.

Folk sources and narratives underlie much of Wuthering Heights.

From 1798 to 1944 the display of coats of arms in Great Britain was taxed. Since there were major changes to the role of heraldry in society in the same period, it is surprising that the records of the tax have gone unstudied. This dissertation evaluates whether the records of the tax can say something useful about heraldry in this period. The…[Read more]