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© 2026 The Animal Turn
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Animals are increasingly at the forefront of research questions – Not as shadows to human stories, or as beings we want to understand biologically, or for purely our benefit – but as beings who have histories, stories, and geographies of their own. Each season is set around themes with each episode unpacking a particular animal turn concept and its significance therein. Join Claudia Hirtenfelder as she delves into some of the most important ideas emerging out of this recent turn in scholarship, thinking, and being.
122 Episodes
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Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Erica Fudge joins Claudia to think about how a focus on meat, flesh, and edibility can provide insights into human and animal histories. They focus on early modern England and discuss everything from bear baiting to cows named in wills and the fact that humans are edible too. Topics Covered: the slip from writing about animals to writing about humans thinking about animals using animal welfare science and lived experience to ask better histor...
Send us Fan Mail John M. Kinder is on the show to discuss World War II and zoos. Together with Claudia the episode touches on how zoos were implicated in the propaganda and the nazification of Europe, how concentration camps had zoos, and some of the devastating day to day decisions that needed to be made about the keeping of captive animals during war time. Topics Covered: John’s pathway from war and society scholarship Zoos as politically fraught spaces The probl...
Send us Fan Mail Historian Michael Glover talks about what it takes to write animal history that treats cows as sentient subjects while still meeting the standards of rigorous scholarship. He unpacks how fieldwork with cows in the Karoo affected his writing. Topics Covered: Michael’s path into animal history through South African landscapes The methodological gap in writing historical animals as subjects Historical ethnography as a way of rebuilding past worlds fr...
Send us Fan Mail In this episode we continue our focus on methodology by talking with Frederick L. Brown about how he used municipal archives to conduct his more-than-human history of Seattle. We discuss everything from petitions to bylaws, pound records, council minutes, public health reports, property tax assessments, and city directories. Topics Covered: why urban animal history matters and why cities are always more than humanhow Seattle’s city archives make animal searching possibl...
Send us Fan Mail In this episode we switch gears toward considering historical methods. Sean Kheraj and Jennifer Bonnell come onto the show to discuss their edited book Traces of The Animal Past and together with Claudia they delve into some of the ways environmental and animal histories differ as well as some of the key methods scholars interested in them can use. Topics Covered: animal history versus environmental historysearching for animals in the archive borrowing tools from ...
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