ASI-UI Human Animal Studies Summer Institute--Plenary videos
KARI WEIL VIDEO
KARI WEIL is University Professor of Letters at Wesleyan University, teaching in the College of the Environment and in Feminist and Gender Studies. Kari Weil has published widely on feminist theory, questions of gender in 19th and 20th century French and European literature, and on theories and representations of non-human animals and human-animal relations. She is the author of the influential volume in our field, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now (Columbia UP, 2012), as well as Androgyny and the Denial of Difference (University Press of Virginia, 1994). Her most recent book is Precarious Partners: Horses and their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France, published in the Animal Lives Series of the University of Chicago Press in 2020). Significantly, in that book, she acknowledges her equine partners Cacahuete, Cash, Bay Knight, and Ender, who inspired and sustained her through her life and work, along with her husband, daughter, and human colleagues. Her Talk: “Creaturely Remains and the Mattering of Memory” is based on a chapter she published last year in the evocatively titled volume from Routledge called Outside the Anthropological Machine: Crossing the Human-Animal Divide and Other Exit Strategies, edited by Chiara Mengozzi.
MAY BERENBAUM VIDEO
Along with her Arthropod Ambassadors, MAY BERENBAUM has been a perennial highlight at this institute since we started in 2017. She has been on the faculty of the Department of Entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1980, serving as head since 1992 and as Swanlund Chair of Entomology since 1996. She is known for elucidating chemical mechanisms underlying interactions between insects and their hostplants, including detoxification of natural and synthetic chemicals, and for applying ecological principles in developing sustainable management practices for natural and agricultural communities. In addition to her more than 230 refereed scientific publications and 35 book chapters, she has directed a film festival of movies about insects and authored numerous magazine articles and six books about insects for the general public, including The Earwig's Tail: A Modern Bestiary of Multi-legged Legends (Harvard University Press, 2009). She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and in 2014, she received the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama. Most recently exciting for us here is that, beginning this year, she is bringing her insectual interdisciplinarity to directorship of the Center for Advanced Studies at UIUC, which hosts this institute and provides our physical headquarters when we meet in person.
LINDSAY MARSHALL VIDEO
LINDSAY MARSHALL is Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With a PhD in History from University of Oklahoma and an M.A. in Liberal Arts from Stanford University, she is currently working on a book manuscript that explores the intersection between changing narratives of the Plains Wars of the late 19th century, secondary U.S. history textbook narratives, and public memory. She also researches the environmental history of human-equine interaction in Indigenous communities with an emphasis on interdisciplinary and decolonial methodologies. In addition to examining these relationships in the archive, her work supports cultural revitalization efforts centered on horsemanship like Natsu Puuku in Elgin, Oklahoma. Her talk, “Hearing History through Hoofbeats: Exploring Equine Volition and Voice in Historical Narrative,” will appear as a chapter in an edited volume through the U of Calgary Press exploring methodological problems in doing archival work on animal history, called Traces of the Animal Past.
TERESA MANGUM VIDEO
TERESA MANGUM is Professor of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa. Her research and teaching focuses on the ways literature and art, especially in 19-century Britain, shaped readers' understanding of women, of late life, and of connections between humans and other animals. Among her book publications is: Married, Middle-Brow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (1998) and her edited book A Cultural History of Women: Volume 5: the Age of Empire, 1800-1920 (Berg, 2013). In addition, Magnum is active nationally as a leader in developing the Public Humanities, and co-edits the book series Humanities in Public Life for the University of Iowa Press. A pioneer in animal studies, she received one of the first Humane Society Animal and Society Course Awards for Innovation, and is also the recipient of the British Women Writers Association Biennial Award (2010), among many other accolades.
Her lecture is focused on unlikely cross-species friendships and our passions for them in visual culture, from memes to FaceBook, to Victorian portraits of animals.
AMY FITZGERALD VIDEO
AMY FITZGERALD is Professor of criminology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. An expert in green criminology, (critical) animal studies, environmental sociology, and gender studies, she is also a founding member of the Animal and Interpersonal Abuse Research Group. Her recent awards include awards for Outstanding Faculty Research at the University of Windsor and an appointment as a Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard University's Animal Law and Public Policy Program in 2020. She is currently working on two grant projects funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: 1) research on the intersection of violence against women and animals in Canadian homes and 2) an analysis of public investment in animal cruelty investigation work.
Her talk focuses on the role of companion animals in domestic violence and recent legislative protections in this sphere in Canada and the U.S.
CHRIS GREEN VIDEO
CHRIS GREEN is the first Executive Director of the Harvard Law School's Animal Law & Policy Program. He previously was the Director of Legislative Affairs for the Animal Legal Defense Fund and the former Chair of the American Bar Association’s TIPS Animal Law Committee. In those capacities, Chris persuaded the top three US airlines to stop transporting endangered animal hunting trophies, helped defeat Ag-Gag legislation in several states, and successfully passed an ABA resolution recommending that all US legislative bodies outlaw the possession of dangerous wild animals. More recently, Chris served on a National Academies of Sciences committee assessing the Department of Veterans Affairs’ use of dogs in biomedical research, and in 2020, in order to reduce the number of family pets shot by police, Chris also authored and passed another ABA resolution urging that all law enforcement officers be provided comprehensive training in non-lethal animal encounters. Chris earlier had been the Executive Producer of the 2015 documentary film Of Dogs and Men focusing on that same issue. He has also consulted widely for major national news outlets like CNN, ABC News, the New York Times and others. Chris is an alumnus of Harvard Law School and of UIUC, and grew up in Illinois on his family's multi-generational farm.
His talk focuses on strategies for social and legal change and emphasizes some of the remarkable advances in animal law, especially in animal agricultural protections, in recent years.