Episode 251: Tame and wild with Marcy Norton

This episode's guest is Professor Marcy Norton of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of History. She's a historian of the early modern Atlantic interested in questions about how Europeans shaped the Americas and how Native American peoples shaped Europe. She's the author of the beautifully named 2008 book Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures, a History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World, but we're going to talk primarily about her 2024 Harvard University Press book The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492.

This is a particularly special episode of Knowing Animals, as it is a tie-in with the Journal of the British Academy, with a written version of the interview appearing in the journal.

In answer to the regular questions, Marcy mentioned:

• J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Animals
• Her chapter 'Animal', in Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7560/753099
• Her chapter 'Going to the Birds' (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781351055741-4/going-birds-marcy-norton) in the book Early Modern Things.
• Cora Diamond's paper 'Eating Meat and Eating People' (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3749876)
• And here is Marcy's Penn profile: https://live-sas-www-history.pantheon.sas.upenn.edu/people/faculty/marcy-norton