Online Event. Friday, February 12, 2021: noon-2pm EST/9am-11am PST
Join us for a roundtable exploring the history of horse breeding and modifications to horse’s bodies for sport and science!
Welcome! This upcoming Equine History Collective Roundtable invites experts in the field of equine studies to discuss modifications to the equine body as responses to culture, science, and medicine in the modern world.
Hosted by Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld (co-editors of Equestrian Cultures: Horses, Human Society, and The Discourse of Modernity and Horse Breeds and Human Society: Purity, Identity and the Making of the Modern Horse), the roundtable asks contributors to reflect on their own work on the subject, comment on current issues in the field, and discuss future directions in research.
Invited speakers include: Richard Nash (Indiana University Bloomington), Karen Raber (University of Mississippi), Jeannette Vaught (Liberal Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cal State-LA) and Susanna Forrest (Author of The Age of the Horse).
To be able to access the event, you must register beforehand through Eventbrite.
Roundtable Speaker Bios:
Richard Nash is a scholar of Human Animal Studies and eighteenth century English culture, and is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Indiana, Bloomington. He is the author of numerous academic articles, including “‘Honest English Breed:’ The Thoroughbred as Cultural Metaphor,” in The Culture of the Horse: Status, Discipline, and Identity in the Early Modern World (2004)–one of the landmark works that reinvigorated the field of equine history. He co-authored The Heath and the Horse: A History of Racing and Art on Newmarket Heath (2015), and his book Wild Enlightenment : The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century (2003) won the Walker Cowen Book Prize. He is also past president of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts.
Karen Raber is a specialist in Renaissance literature with emphasis on ecostudies, animal studies, and posthumanist theory. Her monographs include Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture (U Penn 2013, a finalist for the 2015 ASLE Book Award). She is also coeditor with Monica Mattfeld of Performing Animals: History, Agency, Theater (Penn State, 2017) and with Treva Tucker of The Culture of the Horse: Status, Discipline and Identity in the Early Modern World (Palgrave 2005). She is also editor of Routledge’s series Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture.
Jeanette Vaught researches the intersection of animals, science and culture, in a primarily equine context. She holds a PhD in American Studies and is a former equine veterinary technician. Her research articles include “How to Make a Horse Have an Orgasm,” in Living With Animals: Bonds Across Species, ed. Natalie Porter and Ilana Gershon, Cornell University Press (2018) and “A Question of Sex: Cloning, Culture, and Legitimacy Among American Quarter Horses,” Humanimalia (2018). She is also co-editor of the collection The Relational Arena: How Frameworks of Communication, Care, Politics, and Power Reveal and Conceal Equine Selves, forthcoming in the Human-Animal Series from Brill.
Susanna Forrest is a writer, and author of The Age of the Horse (2017) and If Wishes Were Horses: A Memoir of Equine Obsession (2012). She has contributed articles to several edited volumes, including: “The New Equestrian Economy in China” in Equestrian Cultures in Global and Local Arenas, edited by Miriam Adelman and Kirrilly Thompson (Springer, 2018); “’Horsemeat is Certainly Delicious’: Anxiety, Xenophobia and Rationalism at a Nineteenth-Century American Hippophagic Banquet” in Equine Cultures: Horses, Human Society, and the Discourse of Modernity, 1700–Present, edited by Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld (University of Chicago Press, 2019); and “Inventing the Wild Horse: the Manmade History of the Takhi and Tarpan 1828-2018” in Horse Breeds and Human Society: Purity, Identity and the Making of the Modern Horse, edited by Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld (Routledge, 2020).
