Journal of the History of Biology - Call for Papers: Topical Collection: Human-Animal Boundaries: Biological and Social Connections

Collection Editors: Robert G. W. Kirk and Shira Shmuely

Please read our Author Instructions for Topical Collections (this opens in a new tab) to get further information about the submission, review and publishing process of Topical Collections.

The Journal of the History of Biology invites contributions to a topical collection exploring “Human-Animal Boundaries: Biological and Social Connections.” This collection provides a space for historians to interrogate how the biological sciences, broadly construed, have contributed to answering the question of what is human and what animal? We are interested in how the boundaries of life have shaped the historical development of the biological sciences. Papers may also choose to foreground the constitutive importance of nonhuman life to the history of biology.

We are particularly keen to explore how the history of biology might contribute to wider academic interest in understanding and theorizing human-animal relations. We seek submissions that examine how the biological sciences have constructed and maintained the boundary between human and animal, as well as the myriad ways in which biological research has established and dissolved the boundaries of different forms of life. Recent scholarship, for instance, has asserted that the biological category of species is far from innocent, having historically co-developed with socio-cultural logics of race, gender, colonialism, and dis/ability. How might the history of biology add to or gain from this approach?

We encourage submissions that push the limits of the human-animal frame in line with recent multispecies ethnography that critically examines the shifting contact zones of living beings. From this perspective, the human is constituted through and with nonhuman forms of life. At the moment of writing, the answer to the question, What is life? seems more elusive than it has ever been in the light of biotechnology, genomics, and other developments within the biological sciences. How might history contribute to understanding the transformation of life, which remains the founding object of the biological sciences?

Contributions may cover any era and geography and may address major themes such as animal breeding, domestication, classification and natural history, or the biological reframing of the animal as technology within the agricultural and biomedical sciences. We welcome contributions that align the history of biology with other fields, such as animal studies, human geography, history of emotions, medical humanities, multispecies ethnography, or the environmental humanities.