On November 13 at 3:30 PM EST, the Ball State University Department of History will be livestreaming “Phonographs, Flying Machines, and the Animality of Modernity,” a public lecture to be delivered by Dr. Daniel Vandersommers, assistant teaching professor of history at the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics and Humanities. 

Dr. Vandersommers earned his Ph.D. in History from the Ohio State University in 2014.  He is the author of “Animal Activism and the Zoo-Networked Nation,” published in the Spring 2015 edition of Humanimalia: A Journal of Human/Animal Interface Studies and “Narrating Animal History from the Crags: A Turn-of-the-Century Tale about Mountain Sheep, Resistance, and a Nation,” published in the August 2017 issue of the Journal of American Studies.  He is the recipient of a 2017-2018 NEH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine inPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania and a Newberry Library Short-Term Fellowship in March 2018.  March 2019 will see publication of an anthology, Zoo Studies: A New Humanities, co-edited with Tracy McDonald , and he is under contract with Cambridge University Press to publish the monograph  Humanism Encaged: The American Zoo, 1887-1917.

If you cannot attend in person in Burkhardt Building 222, please consider attending virtually at the Ball State Department of History’s YouTube Channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXjaEBrcY3FWK9HApt_CCEw.

Courtesy of Abel Alves, Professor and Chairperson, Department of History at Ball State University, and author of The Animals of Spain: An Introduction to Imperial Perceptions and Human Interaction with Other Animals, 1492-1826 (Brill, 2011), Brutality and Benevolence: Human Ethology, Culture, and the Birth of Mexico(Greenwood, 1996), “Pets and Domesticated Animals in the Atlantic World” (Oxford Bibliographies, 2017).