Conferences

This workshop continues the project of correcting a long-standing gap in scholarship that has largely brought human-centered assumptions to the study of history, art history, anthropology, cultures, and our environs. The not-so-recent turn to deep ecological history and animal studies is long overdue for the study of South Asia, a few exceptions notwithstanding. The scholarly output of this workshop’s participants represents years of research fully focused on animals and the environment as closely allied with, impacting on, and involved in historical developments, technologies, knowledge systems, shared ecologies, and ways of understanding. Topics addressed will include human-animal relations, megafauna in relation to human-altered environments, ambiguous animal usage for laboring animals, ecologies of water in historical perspective, the role of history in understanding present day ecologies and human-animal encounters, and the question of animal involvement in international trade networks. Scholars in our workshop regularly utilize Malayalam, Sanskrit, Khamti, Assamese, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Marathi, and other languages to carry out their work on the complex ecologies and animals that have made up the South Asian world.