Handbook of Historical Animal Studies

by Mieke Roscher, André Krebber (Editor), Brett Mizelle (Editor)

The handbook provides a comprehensive evaluation of approaches, topics and research areas of the rapidly developing field of Historical Animal Studies. The so called 'animal turn' specifically inspired new takes on writing history. This upsurge in research has led to immense amounts of new empirical studies as well as approaches to historiography, which this handbook aims to systemize.

Mieke Roscher and André Krebber, University of Kassel; Brett Mizelle, California State University, Long Beach, USA.

647 pages, ebook

Published June 8, 2021

About the author

Mieke Roscher leitet das Lehrgebiet Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte (Human-Animal Studies) an der Universität Kassel. Sie hat u.a. zur Geschichte des Tierschutzes und zu Tieren im Nationalsozialismus geforscht und ist Mitherausgeberin des Handbook for Historical Animal Studies.

Reviews

[mantareads · Rating 4 out of 5]

This took me way too long! But it is a very valuable resource for anyone needing an introduction into the field of animal studies and animal history (as I was). Philosophically, the related issues of Agency and anthropocentricity (human-centredness) runs thickly through many of these essays, but I don't see how we can actually ever get away from that, simply because this is bubble we can't escape. Personally, I enjoyed the chapters which grounded themselves tightly and concretely to the historical examples they wanted to talk about.

In general I found papers that wandered thru overly-broad topics and time-periods bland and pretentious. Some of the essays also suffer from the same verbiage that characterises anyone who uses words like aNthRopoCeNe and inTerSEctIONaL like punctuation, and eco- like a compulsory prefix, but otherwise this was a very compelling introduction into this sub-sub-field.