S9E3: Taxonomies with Harriet Ritvo
Harriet Ritvo discusses animals and taxonomy, unfurling the ways in which animals are categorised scientifically and in everyday vernacular. She unfurls what this might mean for how we know animals and the ways in which we understand and write their histories.
Harriet Ritvo is the Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at MIT. She works in the fields of environmental history, the history of human-animal relations, British and British empire history, and the history of natural history. She is the author of numerous books , including The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harvard UP, 1997), The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Harvard UP, 1987), and Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History (Virginia, 2010). Her articles and reviews have appeared in a wide range of periodicals and she is an editor of the “Animals, History, Culture” series published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. She has a great deal of accolades and accomplishments, not least of which is being given the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Environmental History in 2020. Learn more about her here.
Mentioned:
The Platypus and the Mermaid by Harriet Ritvo
The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age by Harriet Ritvo
Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History by Harriet Ritvo
Sex and the Single Animal by Harriet Ritvo
Forty years of embryo transfer in cattle by John F. Hasler
After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America by E. C. Pielou
A list in time: A story of how animals came to be categorized by Claudia Hirtenfelder
The Violent Conservation of the European Wildcat by Virginia Thomas
Compassionate Conservation with Daniel Ramp on The Animal Turn.
Kontihnawa:ra: Atlantic Salmon on Stones
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved” – Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring this podcast; the Sonic Arts Studio and the Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory (SAPLab) for sponsoring this season; Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @_con_sol_) for the bed music, Jeremy John (Website) for the logo. This show is produced and hosted by Claudia Hirtenfelder.