September 2008
1 post
panel prep
Preparing for six monthly panel - will update in two weeks!
August 2008
11 posts
thomas rowlandson
Today I’ve been thinking about eighteenth-century caricature and political satire. Rowlandson’s physignomy will be useful for charting the use of animal as symbols.
chronological challenge
I’m currently working out how to demonstrate chronological change over the period 1675-1815. Not an easy task. One that involves lots of pretty pens and paper. I’ve got a month to work this out before a big panel meeting.
At first I figured I would trace particular animals through this period. But that doesn’t work. Well I mean as content it works but not as a framework. I think...
reading
I’m currently reading an interesting little article on lapdogs as objects, slaves, and counter-sensibility in the eighteenth-century. It talks about the links between abolition and animal sympathy. Ellis concludes that although early anti-cruelty legislation sought to use the language of abolition the impact of this language was minimal since “animals remained things…even if they...
animals in the eighteenth-century
I am looking at animals both living and dead in the eighteenth-century. I am using the ideas of ‘object biographies’ to trace the journeys of these animals from their arrival in Britain to dissection and display in museums and other collections. I am also borrowing from ideas of ‘it-narratives’ in eighteenth-century literature - novels that talk about objects and their...
“Perhaps Keith Thomas’s assertion that there was no concept of cruelty to...”
– Erica Fudge, “Two Ethics: Killing Animals in Past and Present” in Killing Animals The Animal Studies Group
animal commodities, smelling and touching animals
I’ve previously looked at where people could buy and look at exotic animals in eighteenth-century Britain. I’m now trying to write a history of why and when spectators started to touch and ride these animals and what they thought about their smells. I’m trying to link these sensory engagements with the history of commoditised animals.
introduction: animals and me
This is my first blog post. This blog is intended to be a collection of my thoughts on my research, animal rights, veganism, and general stuff. Photographs and recipes will feature often. I’m hoping that recording my ideas on here will serve as a kind of research log and way of developing ideas. Just so I don’t bore people to death I’ll try and make it interesting too!
My...
