The Historians’ Days (in Dutch: Historicidagen) was held at Maastricht University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the end of August and featured a Moving Animal’s panel, “The Unruly Animal: Engaging with Animals in the Past.” Vincent Bijman, Raf De Bont,and Simone Schleper all presented papers.

Below find an abstract of the panel and papers:

The Unruly Animal: Engaging with Animals in the Past
In the recent decades there has been an increased interest in the historical animal. Scholars in interdisciplinary fields such as environmental humanities and human-animal studies emphasize how (past) animals require us to reconsider both traditional research methods and disciplinary boundaries. The animal historians in this panel investigate, based on their current research in animal history, how their work takes inspiration from an undisciplined approach to animal history and what challenges arise while investigating these avenues.

Raf De Bont – Animals of the Past: Between and across Disciplines
Animal history is a young field, and its practitioners diverge on how to approach the animal as a historical subject. Some researchers borrow from present-day life sciences such as ethology or wildlife management to understand the lives of animals in the past, whereas others seek inspiration within the humanities, drawing on fields such as cultural studies and literary criticism. Using mid-twentieth-century zoo animals as my example, I will discuss the opportunities and tensions that arise when historicizing animals between and across disciplines.

Vincent Bijman – Between compliance and resistance: studying the history of animal invasions
Since the late 19th century, certain animal species that moved to new environments became regarded as problematic invasives. They were accused of causing economic disruption, public health issues and/or outcompeting other animals deemed valuable. These ‘invasives’ were subjected to elaborate research and control regimes, sometimes leading to their eradication. Often represented in archival material as static objects of study and control, invasive animals responded in unexpected ways, sometimes allowing for control, but as often displaying forms of resistance. This paper highlights the invasive sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) and shows how with studying past human-animal practices, we can get a better understanding in the ways in which its representation as an animal invasion shifted from a threat to freshwater fisheries to an ecosystemic issue.

Simone Schleper – ‘Nature’s GPS’: Animal navigation research in the second half of the twentieth century
This paper highlights the role of animal navigation research – and to some degree animals – in the making of the postwar global communication nexus. In this context, animals and biologists have mostly been studied as users of technological surveillance systems, for instance in the case of animal tracking by satellite, a practice that has become increasingly important in wildlife management in the 1970s. This paper shows that animal researchers were not just active users of technology. Their work on animal navigation also served as sources of inspiration for engineers. While the concrete biological mechanisms underlying various animals’ navigation skills are still debated amongst biologists, hypotheses, and visions for their potential applicability to human navigation, as well as the perceived need for cross-disciplinary coalitions on the issue of navigation, have been tenacious in both the animal navigation and engineering literature.