Erica Hill and Susan Nance join Claudia on the show to discuss “modernity.” They discuss what this relatively messy shorthand means for history and for understanding human–animal relations. They try to unpack what is meant by modernity and touch on everything from industrialisation to concealment and consumption.
Topics Covered:
Animal History, the journal that tries to understand animals as historical subjects
Using animal welfare science to interpret historical animals’ behaviour
Zooarchaeology, domestication, and deep-time shifts that complicate ideas of modernity
Concealment and the contradictions of animal use
Intensification and standardisation
Celebrity animals and hidden populations
Animal Highlight: Bears in Kingston, Ontario
Date Recorded: 27 April 2026
Erica Hill is President's Arctic Professor at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, Alaska. She is an archaeologist with broad research interests in how humans and animals lived together in the past. She has published extensively on Indigenous human engagement with marine mammals in the North Pacific and has worked in Iceland, Peru, and the US Southwest. Her most recent edited volume is Reimagining Human–Animal Relations in the Circumpolar North (2024) with Peter Whitridge.
Susan Nance is Professor of History and affiliated faculty with the Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. She is the author of various books and articles, including Rodeo: An Animal History (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and Animals in Nineteenth Century America: A History in Documents (Broadview Press, 2026). Susan is also Co-Lead Editor at Animal History, the first scholarly journal dedicated to the histories of animal life and human-animal relationships. Her current research documents the nature and scope of the trade in biologically-wild animals in the 20th century United States through a study of Las Vegas. https://susannance.com/
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