One testament to the growing pull of animal studies is the number of book series, journals, discussion groups, and conferences that have sprung up around the topic. The Animals, History, Culture series, edited by Harriet Ritvo and published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, is one of the oldest. It emphasizes works that are “historically grounded, historically contextualized,” says Ritvo, a history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Cary Wolfe’s Posthumanities series, published by the University of Minnesota Press, is one of the latest offerings. Begun in 2007, it highlights work that seeks to overturn anthropocentric models. That can include scholarship on machines as well as on living things. The press’s director, Douglas Armato, describes the series as “books that really challenge the categories by which we’ve divided ourselves from the rest of creation.”
The series was born about five years ago when Armato and Wolfe, an English professor at Rice University, fell into conversation at a Modern Language Association convention about the wealth of animal-related and posthumanities work they were seeing. “It just seems to be all over the place,” Armato says—and not only in the academic world but in the work of more popular authors such as Temple Grandin, the Colorado State University animal scientist whose autism has given her insight into such issues as how animals in the livestock industry could be more humanely treated. The series looks for work that is “transformative,” Armato says. “It has to be a way of seeing that the ideas we’ve used to position ourselves just don’t hold water and need to be re-examined.”
Although most of the authors in the Minnesota series come from the humanities and social sciences, they pay close attention to scientific research on topics such as ecosystems and animal cognition and culture. That interest in science sets scholars in animal studies apart from many of their colleagues in the humanities. “They’re really talking to scientists,” Armato says of his series authors. “They’re not just raiding papers for tidbits.”
Columbia University Press has also established itself as a strong publisher of animal-studies scholarship. Wendy Lochner, a senior executive editor for philosophy, religion, and animal studies at the press, emphasizes work in which species functions as a critical category, like race or gender. “It requires a radical rethinking of our life on earth and how we view human beings” relative to other animals and the planet, she says.
In 2005, Lochner started Columbia’s series Critical Perspectives on Animals: Theory, Culture, Science, and Law, which is edited by Gary Francione, a professor of law and philosophy at Rutgers University, and Gary Steiner, a professor of philosophy at Bucknell University. The first book in the series was Animal Rights and Moral Philosophy, by Julian H. Franklin, an emeritus professor of political philosophy at Columbia.
Lochner came to animal studies as an animal-rights activist, persuaded by some of the early scholarly work of “the power of literature to advance the animal issue,” she wrote in introducing the series.
Animal studies also has a pragmatic appeal for an editor: It has a market. Books in the Critical Perspectives on Animals series have consistently sold more than expected, and in terms of sales growth do better than anything else she publishes, Lochner says. “You’re going to see a lot more published in this area.” She is developing textbooks for the field, too: animal-studies readers, for instance, to tap into the growing interest in setting up courses in the subject.
An active journals scene supports animal-studies scholarship. One venerable publication, Society and Animals, edited by Kenneth Shapiro, has been around for nearly 20 years. Anthrozöos, which describes itself as “a multidisciplinary journal of the interactions of people and animals,” has been publishing since 1987. The Journal of Critical Animal Studies, which emphasizes “animal-liberation philosophy and policy issues,” dates back to 2003. Two new journals, Humanimalia and the Journal of Animal Ethics, are poised to appear. Ralph R. Acampora, an associate professor of philosophy at Hofstra University, is a member of the “editorial collective” behind the Humanimalia effort and also serves on the board of the Journal for Critical Animal Studies.
Online, the H-Animal e-mail list is active with calls for papers and notices of scholarly gatherings. The Society & Animals Forum, once Psychologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, maintains another e-mail list, Human-Animal Studies; a Yahoo! group with about 750 members, it welcomes contributions and comments from scholars in all disciplines.
Animal-studies scholars also have more face-to-face opportunities to find like-minded colleagues than they did a few years ago. An international conference, “Minding Animals,” took place in Australia in July. First of a planned series, the meeting embraced a wide-ranging agenda that, the organizers said, “incorporates and expands on the areas of ethnozoology, ethnobiology, critical animal studies, society and animals, animal geographies, animal philosophy, and animal law,” as well as how animals are represented in art, music, literature, and on film.
In August 2009, the First World Congress of Environmental History met in Copenhagen. “It was a real surprise how many of the presentations had something to do with animals,” says Ritvo, who attended the gathering. “It definitely is very widespread, this emergent interest.
