This book originated out of my desire to reclaim climate change fiction (cli-fi) from the view that it is primarily concerned with future disasters and written in modes that go beyond realism to encompass the horrors of the looming apocalypse. Brilliant though novels of this kind can be, they seemed to me to run the… Read More »
Androids, aliens, and ghosts: No longer solely the territory of science fiction, the Gothic, and horror, these creatures increasingly cross literary genres as humans renegotiate and rework our conceptualizations of humanity, animality, and life itself in response to ongoing challenges posed by technology, environmental crises, and alterity. Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts borrows from the strangeness, creativity, and freshness of these emerging and imaginary creatures in contemporary novels, comic book series, and children’s books to reconceptualize often intractable views of nonhuman animals. Because these liminal figures confront anthropocentrism, or human-centeredness, in ways that necessarily push against all forms of species dominance, the android, the alien, and the ghost are literary devices that help us to see nonhuman animals afresh and to fruitfully reimagine the terms of our relationships with them.
While researching my Object Lessons series book on glitter, I learned the surprising fact that one of the major commercial uses for this substance is in fishing lures. After finishing the book, I decided to investigate this phenomenon a bit deeper—and fell down what can only be described as a rabbit hole into another world.
Guest post by Marco Caracciolo The future has always been uncertain, but the ecological crisis presents us with an unprecedented degree of uncertainty in thinking about the future. Scientists who model the effects of global warming typically distinguish between pessimistic and optimistic scenarios. The gap between them is significant: concretely, it could mean the difference… Read More »
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, edited by Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg, consists of 32 articles organized in four sections: Paradigms, Ethics, Technology, and Aesthetics. It’s now available in paperback. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism appears in paperback in April 2022. It was first published in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic that is still… Read More »
Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature, by Dominic O’Key, is out now Thank you for joining us today, Dominic. Tell us, how would you describe your book in just one sentence? Reading literature can help us think and rethink our relationships with animals; here’s how. Could you unpack this a bit and explain the main topics… Read More »
What is the Global Challenges in Environmental Humanities series about? By global challenges we mean threats to the biosphere occurring at planetary, pan-continental or trans-oceanic scales. These include biodiversity loss, unsustainable economic and social changes in landscape, or the diverse impacts of climate change on cultural memory and socio-environmental futures – these are among the many risks and vulnerabilities implicated in the latest IPCC reports. Such challenges also include gradually unfolding disasters that are less spectacular, such as disease, nutritional deficiencies or other forms of ill health that stretch over individual human life spans or even across generations, owing to many causes – toxic accumulation of waste in environments, structurally reinforced poverty, environmental racism, failed social policy, cultural inertia, corporate malfeasance and neglect.
Writing about an elusive yet encompassing topic: environmental catastrophe and our role in it Guest Post by Christopher Schaberg I’ve written a strange book about contemporary environmental awareness. It all started about seven years ago, when I thought I might write a book about Michigan. I wanted to write a book that reflected on my… Read More »
