Enfilade

From Leuven University Press, with distribution by Cornell UP:

Daniel Harkett and Katie Hornstein, eds., Animal Modernities: Images, Objects, Histories (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2025), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-9462704589, €60 / $69.

Animal Modernities challenges the traditional human-centered focus of art history and explores how modern art, visual culture, and modernity itself emerge from relationships between humans and animals. The essays in this volume reveal histories of exploitation and domination, as well as confusion and ambivalence, and occasional moments when affinities between humans and animals have been embraced, and animal agency asserted and acknowledged. The authors collectively point to the importance of thinking about animal–human relations for addressing today’s ecological challenges.

This book will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open, a program developed in partnership between JSTOR, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), University of Michigan Press, and The University of North Carolina Press to bring about equitable access and impact for the entire scholarly community, including authors, researchers, libraries, and university presses around the world. Learn more here.

Daniel Harkett is associate professor in the Department of Art at Colby College.
Katie Hornstein is professor in the Department of Art History at Dartmouth College.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction — Daniel Harkett and Katie Hornstein
1  Rethinking the Animal in Art History: Charles Darwin, Karl Woermann, and the Bowerbird — Nina Amstutz
2  Photography Needs Animals: Materials, Processes, and the Colonial Supply Chains of Gelatine Dry Plates — Rosalind Hayes
3  Shooting Elephants and the Performance of Imperial Power — Niharika Dinkar
4  A Tale of Two Serpents — Laura Nüffer
5  Mourning across Species: Ivory Miniatures and Elephant Death — Katherine Fein
6  War Horses, Commemoration, and Mutilation: Copenhagen (1808–1836) and Marengo (ca. 1793–1831) — Katie Hornstein
7  To Fool a Fish: Exploring Interspecies Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Fly-Fishing — Emily Gephart
8  Feline Creativity on the Eve of Modernity — Amy Freund and Michael Yonan
9  The Bird that Cuts the Airy Way: William Blake’s Avian Modernity — Alysia Garrison
10 Bovine Ubiquity — Maura Coughlin
11  Against the Visual: Seals, Indigenous-Settler Relations, and the Material Culture of Sealing since 1697 — Catherine Girard
12  Mr. Crowley’s Signature: Race, Resistance, and the Queerness of American Animal Portraiture — Annie Ronan
13  Memory and Materiality: Commemorating Canine Companions in Eighteenth-Century Britain — Sean Weiss
14  Herd Mentality: Animal Relationality and QueerKinships in the Life and Work of Anton Braith — Stephanie Triplett

Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index