This Spring Quarter, a recent trend in the humanities will move from the conference panel and graduate class to the heart of Weinberg’s curriculum. The Department of English and the Department of Classics will both offer freshman seminars on topics in animal studies.
Humanities courses with animals as subjects have existed for decades. Recently, however, there has been an explosion of animal studies courses at major universities, enough to lead to the founding of the Animals and Society Institute six years ago. The rapidly growing field includes, as ecologist Marc Bekoff told the New York Times in January, “anything that has to do with the way humans and animals interact.”
Evan Mwangi, an associate professor of English at Northwestern, said he noticed “a tendency in the mainstream literary texts to see how humans are represented as animals” in his field.
He speculates that the recent excitement surrounding animal studies is part of an interdisciplinary attempt to “try to fill in the gaps” of scholarship in the humanities, especially in postcolonial literature and art. Even academics not teaching animal studies are writing about it: Associate Professor of English Laurie Shannon’s The Accommodated Animal will be published by the University of Chicago Press later this year, according to her faculty page.
Part of this attempt has involved bringing animal studies classes to undergrads, especially freshmen. While Northwestern has previously offered advanced courses in animal studies in a number of departments, it will join a number of other universities, including Harvard, in adding freshman seminars in the field.
Freshmen will have two animal studies courses to choose from when they register next week. Claudia Zatta, a lecturer in the Department of Classics, will teach a freshman seminar on From Love-Gifts to Beasts: Animals in Antiquity, which will explore “the rich literature about animals in the Greek and Roman world,” and Mwangi, who has previously taught freshman seminars on the pop culture of Africa, will teach a seminar on the Humanity of Animals in Global Literature Cultures.
While Mwangi has enjoyed his previous seminars, he sees the change in topic as an important one. He smiles when he says that we may have “reached a point where we're beyond humans.”