Humans, Animals, and Machines

Catalog description

This course examines the invocation of animals and machines to illuminate the meanings and limits of the human in modern American thought and culture. Our objects of analysis will range from medical experiments to popular films, primatology to video games, and Crispr babies to science fiction. Readings will consider the roles of animals and machines in the history of categories of race, gender, and bodily difference. Throughout we will examine the political, cultural, and epistemological stakes of the shifting boundaries of the natural and the unnatural, as well as the human and non-human.