Dr. Susan McHugh

Dr. Susan McHugh is a Professor and the Chair of English at the University of New England, USA, where she teaches courses in writing, literary theory, and animal studies.  She is the author of Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines (2011), as well as Dog (2004), a volume in Reaktion Books' groundbreaking Animal series and published in 8 languages. She recently co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies (2014) and Literary Animals Look (2013), a special issue of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.  Additionally, she has published dozens of essays in edited collections and peer-reviewed journals, including Critical Inquiry, Literature and Medicine, and PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America.  She has delivered keynote lectures and invited talks in Germany, Sweden, Norway, the UK, and the US. Her ongoing research focuses on the intersections of biological and cultural extinction. McHugh is Series Co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, the first academic book series devoted to literary animal studies, along with serving as the Humanities Managing Editor for the scholarly journal Society and Animals. She also serves as an Editorial Board Member of Animalibus: Of Animals and Cultures (academic book series); Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture; Animal Studies Journal; Environment and History; H-Animal Discussion Network; and Humanimalia: A Journal of Human-Animal Interface Studies.  She is an International Associate of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies, and she is the faculty advisor to Zephyr: UNE's Journal of Artistic Expression. 

Thursday, October 22, 5:00-6:30

"Can We Co-suffer? Speciesism, Racism, and Multitudes"

Deets Library Reference Room

Reviewers of Kornél Mundruczó’s White God (2015) praise its non-CGI execution of a mass street-dogs’ revolt, but express confusion about its meaning: is the uprising metaphorical, like Spartacus in ‘girl-and-her-dog drag’ (1963)? Or is it just more evidence of the impossibility of animal revolutions, The Birds (1960) gone to the dogs? Recognizing in the title an homage to Sam Fuller’s racial non-allegory White Dog (1982), there is a sense of an even more revolutionary shift taking place for animals in film, a change that is captured in viewers of White God’s shifting perceptions of one or several dogs. Drawing comparisons with two contemporary films that link canids to historical acts of mass killing, The Last Dogs of Winter (2011) and Qimmit: A Clash of Two Truths (2010), this talk examines how attention not only to content but also to formal aspects helps to track the halting emergence of a discourse of multitudes appropriate to intersectional analysis of race and species.