Why am I passionate about this?
My fascination and emotional connection with animals have been lifelong. However, it wasn't until my second year as an undergrad student that I realized that human-animal relationship could be examined from philosophical, historical, and anthropological perspectives. Over the past couple of decades, the conversations around the roles of non-human animals in diverse cultural, social, and material contexts have coalesced under the interdisciplinary field known as Animal Studies. I draw upon this literature and use my training in law and PhD in the history of science to explore the ties between knowledge and ethics in the context of animal law.
Shira's book list on getting familiar with multispecies history
Why did Shira love this book?
Anderson examines how domestic animals played into English colonization of the Chesapeake and New England in the seventeenth century.
She shows how the English conceptions of the natural world, which clashed with Native American visions, directed their territorial expansion. At the same time, the new environment transformed the English methods of livestock husbandry.
I learned from this book how to discern the role of animals in even the most commonplace legal arrangements. For example, legislation related to damages done by free-ranged cattle raised fundamental questions about the ownership of nature.
2 authors picked Creatures of Empire as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
When we think of the key figures of early American history, we think of explorers, or pilgrims, or Native Americans-not cattle, or goats, or swine. But as Virginia DeJohn Anderson reveals in this brilliantly original account of colonists in New England and the Chesapeake region, livestock played a vitally important role in the settling of the New World.
Livestock, Anderson writes, were a central factor in the cultural clash between colonists and Indians as well as a driving force in the expansion west. By bringing livestock across the Atlantic, colonists believed that they provided the means to realize America's potential.…