New Books in Animal Studies

Whether we realize it or not, we carry in our mouths the legacy of our evolution. Our teeth are like living fossils that can be studied and compared to those of our ancestors to teach us how we became human. In Evolution's Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins (Princeton UP, 2018), noted paleoanthropologist Peter Ungar brings together for the first time cutting-edge advances in understanding human evolution and climate change with new approaches to uncovering dietary clues from fossil teeth to present a remarkable investigation into the ways that teeth—their shape, chemistry, and wear—reveal how we came to be.Ungar describes how a tooth’s “foodprints”—distinctive patterns of microscopic wear and tear—provide telltale details about what an animal actually ate in the past. These clues, combined with groundbreaking research in paleoclimatology, demonstrate how a changing climate altered the food options available to our ancestors. When diets change, species change, and Ungar traces how diet and an unpredictable climate determined who among our ancestors was winnowed out and who survived, as well as why we transitioned from the role of forager to farmer. By sifting through the evidence—and the scars on our teeth—Ungar makes the important case for what might or might not be the most natural diet for humans.Traveling the four corners of the globe and combining scientific breakthroughs with vivid narrative, Evolution’s Bite presents a unique dental perspective on our astonishing human development.Hussein Mohsen is a PhD/MA Candidate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics/History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. His research interests span network and interpretable machine learning methods for the study of cancer genomics, and the history of human population genetics. For more about his work, visit http://www.husseinmohsen.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: Andrea Laurent-Simpson’s path in and out of and back into graduate school The story of her college dog, who became her family Why she became interested in looking at her pets as family members How her human kids reacted to her research project What her in-person research taught her about human-animal interactions Our book is: Just Like Family: How Companion Animals Joined the Household (NYU Press, 2021),which explores the expanding role of animals in what Dr. Laurent-Simpson calls “the multi-species family,” providing a window into a world where almost 95 percent of adults who share their homes with dogs and cats identify their animal companions as legitimate members of their families.She examines why and how these animals have increasingly become an important part of our households and in our lives, including as siblings to our existing children, as animal children themselves, and even as grandchildren, particularly as fertility rates decline and a growing number of younger couples choose to live a childfree lifestyle. Laurent-Simpson highlights how animals—and their place in our lives—have changed the structure of the American family in surprising ways.Our guest is: Dr. Andrea Laurent-Simpson, Research Assistant Professor andLecturer in the department of sociology at Southern Methodist University. Her work engages identity theory, family and fertility, and human-nonhuman animal interaction. Her research uses original, qualitative, mixed methods data to examine how familial identities are impacted by human-nonhuman animal relationships; how household structure affects resulting identity formation; how this contributes to post-modern, cultural definitions of who or what counts as family; and how dropping fertility rates and delays of first birth characteristic of the second demographic transition aid in the emergence of a “multi-species” family post-1970’s in the U.S. Her newest project examines “pandemic” pets, family structure and health, and pet owner returns to work and school. Her work is award-winning and has appeared in Symbolic Interaction; Sociological Forum; Sociological Inquiry; Sociology of Health and Illness; and Sociological Spectrum. She is the author of Just Like Family: How Companion Animals Joined the Household.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, co-producer of the Academic Life. Her college allowed her to live in a pet-dorm with her dog Riley; he quickly became the best friend of Ratty [the pet rat next door] and frenemy of Ivory [the neighboring dog who tried to steal his toys. Often.].Listeners to this episode might also be interested in: Arluke, Arnold and Andrew Rowan. (2020). Underdogs: Pets, People, and Poverty. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Canales, Alejandra. (2021). “SMU Sociologist’s Research Shows How Pets Have Become Part of the Family.” Dallas Morning News, August 23. Article here. Grimm, David. (2014). Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs. New York, NY: Public Affairs. Irvine, Leslie. (2004). If You Tame Me: Understanding Our Connection with Animals. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Laurent-Simpson, Andrea. (2017). “They Make Me Not Want to Have a Child: Effects of Companion Animals on Fertility Intentions of the Childfree.” Sociological Inquiry 87(4):586-607. Article here. Laurent-Simpson, Andrea. “All In the Family: The Modern Multispecies Household.” The Bark, August 2021. Article here. This program model for “keeping pets with their people” Animal Planet meets cats in pet dorms at Christina’s college You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies

We’re celebrating our one-year anniversary with this interview, and so I wanted to introduce a special guest for today: Nur Nasreen Ibrahim, talented writer, journalist and dear friend.We’re going to talk—mostly—about Nur’s latest work: an essay for the collection Horse Girls: Recovering, Aspiring, and Devoted Riders Redefine the Iconic Bond (Harper Perennial: 2021), edited by Halimah Marcus.Horse Girls confronts, investigates, and fleshes out the trope of the “horse girl”: the idea that all a young girl wants is to learn how to ride a horse, famous in from “Black Beauty” to “My Little Pony”. And Nur’s essay talks about her experiences riding horses growing up in Pakistan: bringing in themes of colonialism, the urban-rural divide, and growing up.But, also, we’ll talk about Nur’s experience as a writer, both in the United States and in Pakistan, and her path to literature.Nur is a journalist, writer, and producer based in New York City. Originally from Lahore, Pakistan, she writes speculative and literary fiction, as well as personal essays. Her fiction and nonfiction has been included in anthologies and collections from Harper Perennial, Catapult, Hachette India, Platypus Press, The Aleph Review, Salmagundi magazine, Barrelhouse, and more. She is a two-time finalist for The Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction. She is a 2021-2023 recipient of the Lighthouse Writers Book Project Teaching Fellowship.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies

Octopus month has morphed seamlessly into Multispecies month here at RtB, bringing with it not only last week's piece on chimpanzees, but also this sparkling conversation about all sorts of multi-species communities. Recorded live in front of an audience of writing students and introduced by Brandeis physicist Matthew Headrick, it features Patricia Alvarez Astacio, an anthropologist and filmmaker. She has made a film about her work in the Peruvian highlands, where people live with, respect, shear and sometimes eat alpacas. Gina Turrigiano, RtB guest-host of long standing, wears her biological hat in this conversation, bringing to bear insights about avian intelligence and the other sorts of animal community that silently surround our species (think microbiome...). John tries to steer the conversation towards SF as usual.Read Transcript Here (or Visit the Recallthisbook.org Transcript page)Upcoming episodes: What do you make of Amazon? The new Sears Roebuck? A terrifying monopoly threat? Satisfaction (a paperback in your mailbox, a Kindle edition on your tablet) just a click away? We talk in early November with Stanford English prof Mark McGurl, who faces that question squarely in his terrific new book, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon.Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies

In September-October 2021, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts exploring the role that research plays in understanding and advocating for human rights in Southeast Asia.For the final episode in the series, Dr Thushara Dibley is joined by Emeritus Professor Peter Windsor who brings to light how research improving animal health and production is intrinsically linked to human rights issues. Reflecting on his extensive field-based research on transboundary livestock disease in the Greater Mekong Region, he argues that through training on biosecurity practices, animal vaccination programs and nutritional interventions, rural households were able to prevent disease transmission and increase their livestock productivity, making farm production more sustainable. With higher income levels, local families’ livelihoods were improved. This enables better access to human rights, such as access to safe housing, access to healthcare, and access to knowledge and education, amongst others.About Peter Windsor:Peter Windsor is Professor Emeritus in the University of Sydney’s School of Veterinary Science since 2014. Peter worked extensively for NSW Agriculture in several roles including diagnostic pathology and livestock disease research and management. In 1998, he undertook a 19-month appointment to the Food Agriculture Organisation in Naga City, in the Bicol region of the Philippines, that eventually led to the successful eradication of Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD). Peter joined the University of Sydney in 2002, where he had a diverse range of teaching, research and administrative roles. His current research portfolio includes applied field-based projects on ruminant health and production problems in Southeast Asia that aim to assist FMD control. He continues his field studies on improving food security in developing countries and animal welfare in production systems, as well as reproductive, congenital, neurological and genetic disease research.For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies

The book Beast Without Purpose: On Post-Domestication and Other Monstrous Rules (Resling, 2021) emerges from the idea of an end to human sovereignty over non human animals. From this A-humanistic approach, the author conceptualizes several ideas for rethinking the crisis of non humans, and for rethinking non human animals themselves. The non human, be it a domesticated animals, a beast or a monster, is being reconsidered through the concepts of radical grace – an act of human grace in its favor, or through a geographical concept of true animal liberation and human restraint. Beast without Purpose is a beast that does not sit in wait for a humanistic judgment, but rather heads out to a new soil, free from human domination.Oren Ben Yosef is a writer, an animal rights activist and an art teacher from Israel. He has talked and written extensively on human-animal relations and has published three books on this subject (all of them in Hebrew, so far). His books are: Behold the Beast: The Destruction of Animals in the Hands of Mankind (Dror, 2015) Beast Without Purpose: On Post domestication and Other Monstrous Rules (Resling, 2019), and World Eaters: Human Violence against Earthly and Extraterrestrial Beings (Resling, 2021). Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies

Those awe-inspiring dinosaur skeletons on display in museums do not spring fully assembled from the earth. Technicians known as preparators have painstakingly removed the fossils from rock, repaired broken bones, and reconstructed missing pieces to create them. These specimens are foundational evidence for paleontologists, and yet the work and workers in fossil preparation labs go largely unacknowledged in publications and specimen records. In Preparing Dinosaurs: The Work Behind the Scenes (MIT Press, 2021), Caitlin Wylie investigates the skilled labor of fossil preparators and argues for a new model of science that includes all research work and workers.Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews, Wylie shows that the everyday work of fossil preparation requires creativity, problem-solving, and craft. She finds that preparators privilege their own skills over technology and that scientists prefer to rely on these trusted technicians rather than new technologies. Wylie examines how fossil preparators decide what fossils, and therefore dinosaurs, look like; how labor relations between interdependent yet hierarchically unequal collaborators influence scientific practice; how some museums display preparators at work behind glass, as if they were another exhibit; and how these workers learn their skills without formal training or scientific credentials. The work of preparing specimens is a crucial component of scientific research, although it leaves few written traces. Wylie argues that the paleontology research community's social structure demonstrates how other sciences might incorporate non-scientists into research work, empowering and educating both scientists and nonscientists.The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies

Peter Godfrey-Smith knows his cephalopods. Once of CUNY and now a professor of history and philosophy of science at University of Sydney, his truly capacious career includes books such as Theory and Reality (2003; 2nd edition in 2020), Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009) and most recently Metazoa. RtB--including two Brandeis undergraduates as guest hosts, Izzy Dupré and Miriam Fisch-- loves his astonishing book on the fundamental alterity of octopus intelligence and experience of the world, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Another equally descriptive title for that book, and for the discussion we share with you here (after Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a Bat?") might be What is it Like to be an Octopus?As always, below you will find helpful links for the works referenced in the episode, and a transcript for those who prefer or require a print version of the conversation. Please visit us at Recallthisbook.org (or even subscribe there) if you are interested in helpful bonus items like related short original articles, reading lists, visual supplements and past episodes grouped into categories for easy browsing.Mentioned in the Episode:--Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin--"Open the pod bay doors, Hal": a chilling line from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)--District Nine (2009, dir. Neill Bloomkamp) in which giant intelligent shrimp from outer space play the role of octopus-like alien intelligence, and prompt a complex but unmistakably racist reaction on their arrival in South Africa.--Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)--Erik Linklater, Pirates in the Deep Green Sea (1949)TranscriptFinally, all listeners and readers who are interested in the gentle art of podcasting are cordially invited to the inaugural Humanities Podcasting Symposium, held over Zoom, October 15-16. Latif Nasser of Radiolab will headline two days of workshops, seminars and discussions among scholars students and amateurs who have fallen in love with the pedagogical and intellectual possibilities the medium affords. Elizabeth and John will both be presenting. Join us. RSVP hereElizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies

Octopuses can open jars to get food, and chimpanzees can plan for the future. An IBM computer named Watson won on Jeopardy! and Alexa knows our favorite songs. But do animals and smart machines really have intelligence comparable to that of humans? In Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart? (MIT Press, 2021), Paul Thagard looks at how computers (“bots”) and animals measure up to the minds of people, offering the first systematic comparison of intelligence across machines, animals, and humans.Thagard explains that human intelligence is more than IQ and encompasses such features as problem solving, decision making, and creativity. He uses a checklist of twenty characteristics of human intelligence to evaluate the smartest machines—including Watson, AlphaZero, virtual assistants, and self-driving cars—and the most intelligent animals—including octopuses, dogs, dolphins, bees, and chimpanzees. Neither a romantic enthusiast for nonhuman intelligence nor a skeptical killjoy, Thagard offers a clear assessment. He discusses hotly debated issues about animal intelligence concerning bacterial consciousness, fish pain, and dog jealousy. He evaluates the plausibility of achieving human-level artificial intelligence and considers ethical and policy issues. A full appreciation of human minds reveals that current bots and beasts fall far short of human capabilities.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies

Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound (University of Washington Press, 2021) tells a story about exploitation and a story of hope. Focusing on the life histories of both humans and the natural world, Williams  presents an account of how people and place are connected by demonstrating the transformation of the landscape through geologic, ecological, and cultural lenses. Through conversations with archaeologists, biologists, and tribal authorities, and getting out in the field himself, Williams traces how humans have developed their infrastructure around Puget Sound while documenting the human interaction with species as geoducks, salmon, orcas, rockfish, and herring. While addressing critical issues linked to iconic species like salmon and orca, the book works to capture the complexities of ecosystems through in-depth dives into the life histories of rockfish, herring, kelp, and oysters. Williams contends how it is not too late to right the wrongs through responsible action and scientific innovation if we recognize the issues created by a colonial legacy, including social injustice towards native peoples, pollution, and exploitation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies