Alison Laurence, M.I.T.
Proposal Type
Panel
Seeking
- Seeking Additional Presenters
- Seeking General Feedback and Interest
Related Topics
- Museums/Exhibits
- Public Engagement
- Animals
Abstract
The “animal turn” is well established across the humanities. Public historians, too, think with and about the non-human world. We work in natural history museums and national parks where critters abound. We protect archives from pests and we research sites where animals are the main attractions. We recognize, too, that members of the public may be accompanied by service animals while they engage with our work. Still, non-humans have been underrepresented on the NCPH program. This session seeks to bring animals to the fore by considering the opportunities available to and obstacles faced by public historians who endeavor to tell stories about and to a world that is more than human.
Description
I seek additional presenters and a moderator to collaborate on a session that considers the ways in which animals feature in public history work—as subjects, as ways to attract and instruct audiences, and, potentially, as audience members themselves. This session takes seriously the humanities’ “animal turn” which contends that nonhuman animals are critical components of the human experience (and worthwhile subjects in their own right). The animal kingdom has the power to captivate and instruct and it has long been recognized as a powerful didactic instrument. For instance, 18th-century English children’s literature relied heavily on animal subjects (presumed to be inherently entertaining) to tutor readers simultaneously in the subject of natural history and about the mores of their society (Ritvo 1985).
In this age of cat memes and goat yoga it is clear such interest in the animal persists and extends beyond childhood. But in what ways do animals matter to public history? How have public history practitioners and scholars dealt with the animals in their own work? Recognizing the draw of the nonhuman, how can we use this to speak to larger and more diverse audiences?
My paper reflects on the charisma of long dead creatures–dinosaurs. Using two case studies, I will demonstrate the reach and public impact of extinct spokes-creatures. In particular, I consider Dino, a sauropod that has served as Sinclair Oil Company’s trademark since 1932, alongside SUE the T. rex, the Field Museum of Natural History’s most famous specimen thanks to contentious provenance and a popular Twitter account. I focus on how these dinosaurs have been used to draw in audiences, creating a broader customer base for Sinclair’s petroleum products and an audience that extends beyond local museumgoers. The success of these campaigns holds lessons for public history work.
Given my topic’s extinct nature, I hope to fill the panel with presentations of a more lively (or, at least, extant) kind. Individuals who work in or research the following are especially welcome to contact me, though this list is not exhaustive:
Zoos and aquaria
National parks and monuments
Natural history museums
Historical reenactment sites that incorporate or omit animals
The accommodation of service animals, per ADA mandate, in public history spaces.
Interested individuals may contact me via this page or by email at [email protected]. Kindly be in touch with an informal presentation proposal by July 6.
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly: Alison Laurence, [email protected].
All feedback and offers of assistance should be submitted by July 1, 2018.If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.
I think if you reframe the proposal to align with the conference theme of “Repair Work,” and somewhat more broadly, it might be easier to find other papers to form a session, in case there aren’t other presenters talking specifically about non-human subjects.
Critters! And Sue! You’re quite right that this isn’t a topic we’ve seen at NCPH much (if at all), and it definitely opens toward lots of big and interesting questions. My hunch is that it might be wise to bracket zoos and aquaria per se, since in some ways an institution focused explicitly on animals is quite different from an institution where they’re more tangential or incidental. So focusing just on history (including natural history) could be a useful way to sharpen this discussion. You mentioned reenactment/living history and I would just broaden that to include agricultural history sites and/or places that have some connection to agriculture (eg historic houses that were once part of farms), whether or not they do living history. (I’m remembering the Eisenhower farm at Gettysburg and the great story the guides tell there about how nervous Eisenhower’s secret service guides–non of them farm boys–always got about being around his prize bulls, which the former President loved to show off.) The issue of whether such sites include or omit animals is an intriguing one – how might the absence of living animals shape our encounters with history?