Histoire animale

Animal History Group Conference

Call for papers

Online, Thursday 8 July 2021

Animal Archives

Keynote speaker: Dr Rohan Deb Roy

The Animal History Group is a network for postgraduates, academics, archive and museum workers and other professionals whose work engages with animals in history. We are delighted to announce that, on 8 July 2021, we will be holding our fifth annual conference which will conclude our 2020/21 series of online events! We are honoured to be welcoming Dr Rohan Deb Roy as our keynote speaker. Rohan is Associate Professor at the University of Reading, and his research addresses the histories of science and medicine, histories of empire and colonialism, environmental history and animal history. In 2017 he published Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India, 1820-1909 with Cambridge University Press.

We welcome papers from across the field which speak in some way to the conference theme of ‘Animal Archives’. Potential themes might include the challenge of uncovering animal histories in archive sources, thinking creatively about what constitutes an archive, or indeed cases of animals literally in the archives themselves. We set no limitations on species or period, and welcome papers exploring any aspect of human-animal relationships, whether concerning companion animals, livestock, wild animals, animal health and disease, or animal afterlives as museum specimens or artefacts. Submissions from graduate students are especially encouraged.

Speakers will be convened into panels of related 15-20 minute papers by the conference organisers, with a shared session for questions at the end of each panel. The exact format and timings of the day are yet to be confirmed, but we welcome submissions from scholars in all parts of the world and will endeavour to put together a final programme which accommodates international time differences!

Paper proposals should be submitted to animalhistorygroup@gmail.com. Please include a title, an abstract (up to 250 words) and a speaker biography (up to 100 words).

The deadline for submissions is 16 April 2021.

Contact for queries: animalhistorygroup@gmail.com