HIST 477 - Humans and Other Animals: Critical Animal Studies

(3 credits)

This course will explore the historical and evolving boundary between humans and non-human animals, as envisioned, dictated, described, and represented in human society and culture from about the sixteenth century to the present (focusing largely upon the nineteenth century to the present). Since animals lack language, they neither leave records nor articulate their experiences, historians can only assess the relationship between humans and non-human animals from the perspective of the human. Does that mean that animals do not have a history? In this course, we will endeavor to tell “the story of the animal” by examining the ways in which views of what it means to be either “animal” or “human” have changed, and how they continue to change. We will consider “animals” as they have been the subject of human use, abuse, domination, fascination, liberation, respect, and affection. Though this course will operate from the assumption that the line between human and animal is one that is historically constructed, as opposed to being “natural,” we will concern ourselves less with getting directly involved in ethical debates than in studying what these debates tell us about the history of human/animal relationships. As needed.