Human/Being, 1400-1800, Conference 2: Human/Animal

Organized by Javier Patiño Loira (University of California, Los Angeles) and David P. Bardeen (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

This conference is part of the 2026-27 Core Program, a year-long series of three conferences – Human/Plant, Human/Animal, and Human/Machine – that invite participants from across the humanistic disciplines (including history, art history, history of science, literature, philosophy, religious history, and ecocriticism) to explore how early moderns (1400-1800) sought to define and understand themselves through their relationships with non-human life forms, entities and systems. The rise of generative models and autonomous systems has provoked intense anxieties about human exceptionalism, posing the deceptively simple question: What does it mean to be human? But “the human” has never been a stable category, particularly during the early modern period, when artists, writers and thinkers grappled with the slippery boundaries between human and non-human agencies.

The second conference, Human/Animal, shifts focus to the relationship between human and animal life. In the early modern imagination, animals served both as mirrors for human social hierarchies and as test cases for the supposed uniqueness of the human capacity for rational thought. Developments in anatomical practice and theology encouraged scholars and writers to consider the moral status of animals, their communicative potential, and their capacity for suffering. Simultaneously, new technologies (such as taxidermy), practices (hunting, selective breeding, and domestication), and disciplines (comparative physiology and natural history illustration) generated radical insights into animal behavior, anatomy, and cognitive life. Contributors will consider how these shifting perceptions challenged human exceptionalism, blurred the boundaries between the “civilized” and the “savage,” and paved the way for modern understandings of biological kinship, as well as the role animals played in systems of colonialism, slavery and resource extraction. For this session, “animal life” is defined broadly to include beings that occupy ambiguous spaces in the historical imagination—including “monstrous” births, mythical beasts, microscopic organisms, and social insects—as well as the porous boundary between the tame and the wild.

Speakers

David P. Bardeen, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Diogo Cabral, Trinity College Dublin
Mackenzie Cooley, Hamilton College
Tomasz Grusiecki, Queen’s University
Elena Janney, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Marcy Norton, University of Pennsylvania
Maurice Saß, Alanus University
Gavin Steingo, Princeton University
Molly Warsh, University of Pittsburgh

This event is free to attend with advance registration and will be held in-person at the Clark Library. Seating is limited. Walk-in registrants are welcome as space permits. The registration form will be posted here approximately one month in advance of the program.

Image credit: Tacuinum sanitatis, Österreiche Nationalbibliothek, call number Cod. Ser. n. 2644, (fol. 40r).