The 2017 Ian Fletcher Memorial Lecturer was Teresa Mangum of the University of Iowa, who presented "When the Lion Lies Down with the Lamb: The Art of Interspecies Attachment."
From the early chapters of Genesis to last week's Youtube videos, we adamantly imagine cross-species affection. These interspecies memes illuminate how shifting fantasies of hierarchy, agency, and attachment made the survival of nonhuman species so precarious. At the same time, subtle changes in the representations of interspecies over time offer hope that animals and animal studies might be homed within the larger networks and long view of environmental cultural studies to the benefit of human and nonhuman animals alike.
A professor in gender, women's, and sexuality studies, Teresa Mangum directs the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Married, Middle-brow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (1998); editor of A Cultural History of Women: Volume 5: The Age of Empire, 1800-1920 (2013); and guest editor of special issues of Philological Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Periodicals Review, and the Journal of Aging Studies.
With Anne Valk of Brown University, Mangum co-edits the book series Humanities and Public Life for the University of Iowa Press. As well as exploring the ways that nineteenth-century British novels shaped readers' understanding of women, of late life, and of connections between humans and other animals, she also publishes on current issues: publicly engaged pedagogy, the place of service in an academic career, and graduate student placement.
This event, which was free of charge and open to the public, was sponsored by the Department of English, an academic unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU.
