How We Love: Animal Affects in 18th Century Literary Culture

The love that exists between humans and animals is unique, intriguing, and perhaps even transformative. How does that love play a role in human-animal identity?

Students are invited to hear Dr. Laura Brown from Cornell University speak about depictions of human-animal relationships in early 18th-century British literature, and learn how those relationships continue to influence and perhaps even complicate notions of identity in the 21st century.

Dr. Brown is a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar. In her work, she studies women writers, slavery and imperialism, species and racial difference, the portrayal of animals, and the imaginative force of “things.” She teaches courses on these topics, as well as on writing in Cornell’s First Year Writing Seminar Program.

Her most recent books, "Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination" and "Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century," explore the rise of the modern imaginative engagement with animals and the ways in which cultural history shapes literary form, from the creation of the stock market and the development of urban sanitation, to the public appearances of American Indian and African "princes" who visited London.