CALL FOR PAPERS: SFEVE Annual Conference 2016: Becoming Animal with the Victorians

Université Paris Diderot, Thursday 4 – Friday 5 February 2016

The subject of Victorian relationships with animals is a complex one and necessitates an engagement with many disciplines from history, economics and politics to botany, zoology, art and literature. That relationship is often one of dominance but it is also an embrace of the animal as an ideal and a questioning of the centrality of the human. The concept of “becoming-animal” that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari develop in a number of their writings seems to question animal-human boundaries and creatively stretch the limits of the human – not only in terms of metamorphosis but in the possibility of new identities and the freedom to become something new and other. The title of the conference also gestures ironically at the idea that animals ‘become’ us – that they ‘suit’ or ‘enhance’ us; the Victorians literally ‘wore’ them but they also wanted to become like them – run wild, forget to be human, forget to be Victorian.

From Lewis Carroll’s improbable Dodo and elusive Cheshire cat in Alice and Wonderland to Rossetti’s famous menagerie and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s beloved spaniel Flush, Victorian culture teems with actual or imaginary animals in their relations to us. In a century that witnessed the emergence of public zoos, animal protection societies and the theory of natural selection but also encouraged big game hunting in the British Empire and condoned cruelty to wild animals, ambivalent attitudes prevailed, leading to major public debates on issues like vivisection or the possibility of an animal soul. This conference will assess the place of animals in Victorian society and the scope of animal/human interactions. With the current rise of critical Animal Studiesand a real “animal turn” in academic research, it is timely for the Société Française d’Etudes Victoriennes et Edouardiennes to consider Victorian culture and history from the point of view of the animal and to give back power, voice and even subjectivity to its furred and feathered friends.

This year’s annual conference will address the following issues:

• Animals in Science and natural history
• Darwinism/ Species
• Animality/bestiality/animacy
• Souls, subjectivities and anthropomorphism
• Bestiaries/beasts/hybridity
• Zoos, menageries, exotic pet shops
• Animals and Empire
• Pets and petkeeping
• Celebrities and their dogs/cats
• The Animal industry (exotic animals, monkeys, parrots, whales)
• Animal Entertainment (fairgrounds, shows) 
• Animal rights (experimentation, protection, vegetarianism, ecosystems)
• Animals and gender/ Animals and class
• Dressing/Fashion and Animals (furs, feathers, costumes, mimetism and camouflage)
• Taxidermy and Animal Collecting
• Rare or Extinct Animals 
• Animal Phobias and Fancies
• Steam Punk and Victorian animal fantasy in film and video games.
• Fairgrounds and animal entertainment (bears, dogs and badger-baiting)
• Consuming Animals (Diets and ethical issues)
• Envisioning/staging Animals (in the Visual Arts or Drama)
• Micro animals and the microscopic creatures.

As with previous SFEVE colloquia, this event will focus on broad notions that will be of interest to scholars from a range of fields, including disciplines such as (but not limited to) anthropology, sociology, history, cultural studies, literature studies, art history, science and technology studies, ethology, psychoanalysis, psychology, behavioural sciences and ecology.

Please submit abstracts (250 words + a brief scholarly biography) to fabienne.moine@wanadoo.fr, laurence.constanty@gmail.com, prum.michel@wanadoo.fr, sara.thornton@univ-paris-diderot.fr no later than 25 October, 2015.

University of Sidney Lecture: “Farmyard choreographies in early modern England”, Professor Erica Fudge

Co-presented with HARN, the Human Animal Research Network at the University of Sydney

Date: 5 August, 2015
Time: 6:00-7:30pm
Venue: Law School Common Room, Level 4, Sydney Law School, Eastern Avenue, the University of Sydney
RSVP: Free and open to all with online registration requested. To register, visit: whatson.sydney.edu.au/events/published/sydney-ideas-professor-erica-fudge

How do we read animals that have left almost no textual traces? That is the central question here. Following a path from the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak, and the work of John Law and Donna Haraway, through Renaissance dance manuals (encountering some drunks along the way), the paper ends up in the fields and farmyards of early seventeenth-century Essex, chasing glimpses of human-livestock interactions. The problem faced is that these relationships were largely tacit ¬ there is very little written record of what it was like to live with a cow; or what it was like to be a sheep in the early modern period.

The paper asks, then, what kind of reading might we do when we are engaging with texts that are not there? The evidence used to begin to answer these questions is early modern, but the hope is that some of the implications might have a wider resonance in animal studies.

Professor Erica Fudge is Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, and is the Director of the British Animal Studies Network. Her publications are in two main areas: work written for a wider than academic audience on human/animal relations – Animal(2004) and Pets (2008) as well as articles in History Today magazine; and academic work on early modern culture – her books Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (2000) and Brutal Reasoning: Animals, History and Humanity in Early Modern England (2006). She will be taking up an AHRC one-year research fellowship in September 2015 to undertake further work exploring the lives of the people and animals on early modern English smallholdings – she wants to know what it was like to be a cow in the early seventeenth century.

Forum for European Philosophy Event: European Provocation

Plato between the Teeth of the Beast: Animals and Democracy in Tomorrow’s Europe

Tuesday 11 February, 6.30 – 8pm
Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building, LSE

Richard Iveson, Research Fellow, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland

Chair: Danielle Sands, Visiting Lecturer, Department of English, QMUL and Forum for European Philosophy Fellow

How important are animals to the constitution of democracy? In constructing his famous Republic, Plato expressly warns of the dangerous link between the liberation of animals, the uprising of the proletariat, and the founding of democracy. Unwittingly, Plato alsoreveals that an increased ‘sensitivity’ towards the fate of bonded animals marks an essential first step towards a truly free society. From this starting point, Richard Iveson will consider whether the egalitarian entanglement of humans and other animals in fact constitutes the prior condition of any democratic community.

Suggested hashtag for this event for Twitter users: #LSEanimals

Podcasts of most FEP events are available online after the event. They can be accessed at www.philosophy-forum.org

All events are free and open to all without registration
For further information contact Juliana Cardinale: 020 7955 7539
J.Cardinale@lse.ac.uk

Forum for European Philosophy
Cowdray House, Room G.05, European Institute
London School of Economics, WC2A 2AE
www.philosophy-forum.org