Episode 120: Monsters, Inc. and the Monstrous History of Humans with Dr. Surekha Davies

This week Dr. Surekha Davies joins in to talk about a different way of seeing human history--through monsters. According to her, Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. So our conversation reveals how people have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how they invented race, gender, and nations along the way. And to do so, we are talking about one of the very best Pixar films ever made: Monsters, Inc. This episode is so good that it's scary.

About our guest:

Dr. Surekha Davies is a British author, speaker, and historian of science, art, and ideas. Her first book, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human, won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history from the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Roland H. Bainton Prize in History and Theology. She has written essays and reviews about the histories of biology, anthropology, and monsters in the Times Literary Supplement, Nature, Science, and Aeon.