Fri, April 23, 2021
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM EDT
Register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/spring-speaker-series-elizabeth-mcneill-tickets-143312530637
The 19th-century origins of studying animal behavior is commonly traced back to Darwin’s experiments in the late 1830s at the London Zoological Gardens with the aim of researching mental evolutionism. Inthis talk, McNeill complicates this origin story by re-situating it within the 19th-century history of psychology in the German-speaking world and, more specifically, the slow, contentious rise of animal psychology as a viable object and mode of scientific study. By tracking the shift from the question of the “animal soul” to that of the “animal expression of emotions” over the course of the 19th century, she draws into relief the tenuous position of “the animal” (and those who wished to study its inner life) in emerging psychological fields, as the positivist, experimental natural sciences gradually dethroned natural philosophy.
Speaker
Elizabeth McNeill is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, “Speaking (of) Animals in the Life Sciences and Literature of 20th-Century Germany,” tracks the various knowledge practices at work in the constellation of animality, language, and experimentation from the mid-19th to the late-20th century in the German-speaking world. “Speaking (of) Animals” ultimately reorients well-known scientific and literary figures such as Franz Kafka, Wilhelm Wundt, Robert Musil, and Konrad Lorenz in the context of once popular but today mostly forgotten or disqualified scientific discourses about animal intelligence and communication.