Session Abstract

The advent of the animal in historical inquiry raises enduring and new questions for scholarship.  How are new fields of inquiry carved out within, outside of, or between established disciplines?  To what extent does the introduction of these fields call for a reexamination of known texts, inspire the discovery of new source material, and change the disciplines of scholarly inquiry?  Is the analytical vocabulary that becomes most effective or normative in those fields relevant across disciplines?  In particular, are categories like “Animal Studies” and “Posthumanism” useful categories for all historians, or all disciplines, in all geographical and temporal contexts?  If not, what challenges bear on their translation, and what alternatives may be available, either from within the historical profession or from without?  Finally, what implications may follow for “humanistic” research in general, as a result of their reconfiguration through reworkings of inherent tensions within the animal imperative?   This panel offers answers to these questions from several disciplinary, geographical, and temporal contexts.  Susan Crane reexamines the significance and meaning of animal miracle tales of medieval saints within the British hagiographic traditions.  Haiyan Lee charts an emergent language in contemporary Chinese literature that is neither wholly anthropocentric nor posthuman, most clearly evident in representation of the wild rather than the more conventional pet.  Alan Mikhail proposes a kind of scientific turn, and of the value of drawing in particular on Ethology and Evolutionary Biology to supplement historians’ efforts to recover the subjective experience of animals from familiar historical source material.