New Books in Animal Studies Podcast
1) Danielle Alesi, "Eating Animals in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Consuming Empire, 1492-1700" (Taylor & Francis, 2025)
Eating Animals in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Consuming Empire, 1492-1700 (Amsterdam University Press, 2025) by Dr. Danielle Alesi examines how the perceived edibility of animals evolved during t...Show More
2) Kevin J. Mitchell, "Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Scientists are learning more and more about how brain activity controls behavior and how neural circuits weigh alternatives and initiate actions. As we probe ever deeper into the mechanics of decision...Show More
3) Yossi Yovel, "The Genius Bat: The Secret Life of the Only Flying Mammal" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)
With nearly 1500 species, bats account for more than twenty percent of mammalian species. The most successful and most diverse group of mammals, bats come in different sizes, shapes, and colors, from ...Show More
4) Jerry Moore, "Cat Tales: A History" (Thames & Hudson, 2025)
For as long as cats have coexisted with humans, they have been feared, revered and respected. They appear as dynamic hunters in Palaeolithic carvings and cave paintings; were venerated as gods in anci...Show More
5) Living Night: On the Secret Wonders of Wildlife After Dark
When the sun sets, things start to get interesting among wild animals. Wherever we live, whether in the city or suburbs or country, darkness conjures a hidden world of wildlife that most of us rarely ...Show More
6) Ludovic Orlando, "Horses: A 4,000-Year Genetic Journey Across the World" (Princeton UP, 2025)
In 2016, Ludovic Orlando, a genetics researcher, embarked on the Pegasus Project, an ambitious endeavor to use genetics to discover the origin of the modern horse. There were plenty of theories as to ...Show More
7) Eduardo Mercado III, "Why Whales Sing" (JHU Press, 2025)
With breathtaking complexity and haunting beauty, the songs of whales have long fascinated scientists. Whales are the only mammals that can sing continuously for ten hours or more, changing the unique...Show More
8) Thomas Fleischman, "Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany's Rise and Fall" (U Washington Press, 2020)
The pig played a fundamental role in the German Democratic Republic's attempts to create and sustain a modern, industrial food system built on communist principles. By the mid-1980s, East Germany prod...Show More
9) Karine Gagné, "Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas" (U Washington Press, 2019)
In her new book, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas (University of Washington Press, 2019), Karine Gagné explores how relations of reciprocity between land, humans, anim...Show More
10) Anastasija Ropa, "The Medieval Horse" (Reaktion Books, 2025)
Anastasija Ropa joins Jana Byars to talk about The Medieval Horse (Reaktion, 2025), a book that explores the role of horses across the medieval world, from the Kievan Rus' and Scandinavia to Central E...Show More