Biographical Statement
Sarah Bezan is Lecturer in Literature and the Environment at the Radical Humanities Laboratory at University College Cork, Ireland.
ANIMAL REMAINS conference
(SHEFFIELD, APRIL 2019)
A Report by Sarah Bezan
From April 29-30th 2019, ShARC was host to nearly ninety delegates and visitors from across the UK and abroad. The Animal Remains Conference, a biennial conference held jointly between ShARC and BIOSEC (a European Research Council-funded project under the administration of School of Politics Professor Rosaleen Duffy), explored how animal remains function in and beyond the realms of politics, literature, natural history, and aesthetics.
As co-organizers, Robert McKay and I sought to open up the parameters of ‘animal remains’ to explore its murky underbelly and its multiplicitous associations across the interdisciplinary interstices of the arts, humanities and social sciences. In keeping our original call for papers open to interpretation, we were rewarded with a truly multidisciplinary meeting that redefined the matter and meaning of ‘animal remains’ in important ways. From an examination of petrocultures (or energy humanities) to analyses of industrial commodities, extinction narratives, aliens/androids, osteobiographies and zooarchaeologies, de-extinction, taxidermy, dinosaurs and natural history museums (to name a few), the conference contributions illuminated the less apparent but nevertheless urgent ways in which nonhuman animals and environments figure into the planetary past, present, and future.
All of a superbly high quality, the presentations delivered by our conference participants confirmed what we already proposed in our call for papers (that animal remains are ubiquitous), but also — and more importantly — provoked a targeted set of responses to how and why animal remains continue to confound our understanding of the life, death, and afterlives of species. In Steve Baker’s Fieldwork exhibition (a collection assembled by Steve Baker in his role as artist-in-residence), we were invited to reflect on the absences of particular species, along with their delicate traceries (from spider webs to crushed roadkill), which complicate straightforward temporal narratives and conceptions of animals and environments.
Likewise, the keynote addresses by Thom van Dooren and Lucinda Cole (both vibrant and intellectually rigorous in their approach to animal remains) proposed innovative sets of questions for how we apprehend wider systemic practices and histories. Colonialization (particularly in island ecosystems) became a focal point for us as we considered the extent to which phenomena like mass extermination, zoonotic disease, and conservation practices like assisted colonisation might widen the scope of our scholarly inquiry to include an awareness of the nonhuman animal lives lost or recovered in and through the intervention of humans over the last few decades, and even centuries.
Contributions by our plenary speakers Jane Desmond, Mario Ortiz-Robles, and Michelle Bastian also contextualized how animal remains intersect with, and transcend, institutionalized or disciplinary approaches to the life and death of nonhuman animals. Jane Desmond’s sensitive and thoughtful treatment of animal cremains (namely of companion animals) in terms of the performance of bereavement addressed the symbolic and affective bonds that are formed within the human-animal relationship after death. Meanwhile, Mario Ortiz-Robles offered a diachronic reading of the natural history museum and a critical analysis of its future in light of the acceleration of anthropogenic species losses. Navigating through animal remains as they appear in an oceanic context, Michelle Bastian asserted that death (particularly in the form of whale falls) can establish collectivities that in turn support life in ecosystems typically bereft of sustenance (like the depths of the ocean floor).
At every turn, Robert McKay and I were impressed by the sophistication of the conference contributions, which were richly layered in terms of how they both conceptualized and reconfigured the meaning of animal remains. The contributions as a whole challenged our own presumptions about what animal remains do, how they make meaning, and in what ways they matter.
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Stay tuned for a forthcoming edited volume on Animal Remains!
Podcasts with keynotes Thom van Dooren and Lucinda Cole are below, as well as a conversation with Steve Baker, the Artist in Residence. If you missed the keynotes from Thom van Dooren – ‘Moving Birds in Hawai’i: Assisted colonisation in a colonised land‘ and Lucinda Cole – ‘Plagues, Poisons, Dead Rats: In Search of A Medical Posthumanities‘, you can watch them again below. More details are available on the ShARC website.
*see https://biosecproject.org/2019/05/06/comment-animal-remains-sheffield-april-2019-a-report-by-sarah-bezan/ for more!
October 24th, 2017. http://news-centre.uwinnipeg.ca/all-posts/uwinnipeg-instructor-earns-fellowship-to-study-paleoart-in-england/
UWinnipeg alumna and instructor Dr. Sarah Bezan is heading across the pond in January to begin a two-year fellowship at the University of Sheffield’s Animal Studies Research Centre in England thanks to a prestigious award.
Bezan was recently selected as a Newton International Fellow, which is given annually to 40 early stage post-doctoral researchers from around the world, and provides funding for two years of work at a variety of institutions in the United Kingdom.
“I was absolutely thrilled to learn that I had been selected as a Newton International Fellow,” said Bezan, who currently teaches in UWinnipeg’s Department of English. “My host supervisor at Sheffield, Bob McKay, has been incredibly supportive of my work, and I’m certain that the next few years of collaborative research will prove to be very fruitful.”
During the fellowship, Bezan will investigate how paleoart — artwork that attempts to recreate prehistoric life according to current scientific understanding — engages with humanity’s future on Earth during a time of environmental uncertainty. She became interested in the topic after unearthing the vertebrae of an 80 million year old reptile during a dig she took part in last year with the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre.
“The experience encouraged me to think about how paleoartists over the past several centuries have come to visually represent prehistoric life,” she said. “How do we present visual narratives of evolutionary progress, given that prehistoric life has never been observed by humans?”
In trying to answer this question, Bezan has taken an interest in the work of Canadian scientific illustrator Julius Csotonyi; and has discovered that most 19th and 20th century paleoart focuses on humans as the end result of natural scientific processes. In contrast, she argues that, because of human-accelerated global climate change and the possible extinction of Homo sapiens, contemporary paleoartists are beginning to challenge these conventions.
Sheffields Animal Studies Research Centre (ShARC) is one of the world’s foremost critical networks for interdisciplinary animal studies research in the arts, humanities, social sciences that focuses on nonhuman animals and human-animal relationships.
The Newton Fellowship will provide Bezan with a significant amount of funding for attending conferences, conducting archival research, and organizing keynotes and special seminars at ShARC.