Animal Encounters

The fast-growing field of Animal Studies is a varied and much contested domain. Engagement with animals has encouraged both collaboration and conflict between researchers within the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Animal Encounters comprises a series of meetings not only between diverse beasts, but also between distinct disciplinary methods, theoretical approaches, and ethical positions. The essays here collected come together from literary and cultural studies, sociology and anthropology, ecocriticism and art history, philosophy and feminism, science and technology studies, history and posthumanism, to study that most familiar and most foreign of creatures, ‘the animal’. These encounters between leading practitioners in the field highlight the promise and potential of interspecies exchange and mutual provocation.

The fast-growing field of Animal Studies is a varied and much contested domain. Engagement with animals has encouraged both collaboration and conflict between researchers within the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Animal Encounters comprises a series of meetings not only between diverse beasts, but also between distinct disciplinary methods, theoretical approaches, and ethical positions. The essays here collected come together from literary and cultural studies, sociology and anthropology, ecocriticism and art history, philosophy and feminism, science and technology studies, history and posthumanism, to study that most familiar and most foreign of creatures, ‘the animal’. These encounters between leading practitioners in the field highlight the promise and potential of interspecies exchange and mutual provocation.

Tom Tyler, Ph.D. (2005) in Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Culture at Oxford Brookes University, UK. He has published widely on animals in philosophy and critical theory. His book CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers is forthcoming.
Manuela S. Rossini, Ph.D. (2002) in English Literature, University of Basel, is a Project Manager at td-net (Network for Transdisciplinary Research) of the Swiss Academies. She has published in Early Modern Studies, Gender Studies and Science & Literature Studies.