Animal Crossings
Animal Crossings is an interdisciplinary panel discussion on the place of animals in the history of science, natural history, evolutionary biology, religion, literature, and the law, featuring Janet Browne (Harvard), Harriet Ritvo (MIT), Peter Sacks (Harvard), and Paul Waldau (Tufts), and moderated by Marjorie Garber (Harvard).
WEDNESDAY, MAY 9
7:30 PM
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
HARVARD HALL 104
Janet Browne is Aramont Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University.
Browne is the author of The Secular Ark: Studies in the History of Biogeography (Yale) and the landmark two-part biography of Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin: Voyaging and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Knopf), the second volume of which won a number of prizes. She has also recently authored Darwin’s Origin of Species: A Biography (Atlantic). She is currently working on a cultural history of the gorilla.
Harriet Ritvo is Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at MIT.
Ritvo is the author of The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination and The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (both Harvard), as well as editor of Charles Darwin’s The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (Johns Hopkins). She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has written widely on environmental and cultural history, and the history of human-animal relations. Ritvo is working on a study entitled “The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and the Victorian Environment.”
Peter Sacks is John P. Marquand Professor of English at Harvard University.
Sacks is the author of The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Johns Hopkins), which won the 1985 Christian Gauss Award for the best book of literary scholarship published in the United States. He has published five volumes of poetry, most recently Natal Command (Chicago), O Wheel (Georgia), and Necessity (Norton), and his poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The Paris Review. In his late forties, Sacks transformed himself into a painter and has held solo exhibitions in Paris. He has been called an artist “whose sense of history lies deep in his bones” (J. M. Coetzee).
Paul Waldau is Director of the Center for Animals and Public Policy, and Assistant Professor of Environmental and Population Health at Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine.
Waldau is the author of The Specter of Speciesism: Buddhist and Christian Views of Animals (Oxford) and co-editor (with Kimberley C.
Patton) of A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics (Columbia). He was appointed the first Barker Lecturer in Animal Law at Harvard Law School where he was also one of the organizers of the conference, “The Evolving Legal Status of Chimpanzees” (2002).
Waldau is Vice-President of The Great Ape Project and a member (with Jane Goodall) of the Chimpanzee Collaboratory. He also founded the Animals and Religion Consultation at the American Academy of Religion.
Marjorie Garber is Chair, Department of Visual and Environmental Studies; Director, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts; and William R.
Kenan, Jr. Professor of English at Harvard University.
Questions? Contact facing.animals@gmail.com
To read and/or view the proceedings of FACING ANIMALS, the first event in this series, go to:
www.hcs.harvard.edu/~hrp/lectures.htm
William Lynn :: May.08.2007 :: Human-Animal Studies :: No Comments »