Research Objectives
The purpose of the Cultures of Species Revival Research Group is to foster scholarly discussion on the subject of de-extinction, an emerging area of biotechnological science that aims to resurrect extinct species. The members of this group acknowledge that de-extinction generates a number of bioethical concerns, while also creating opportunities for more closely scrutinizing the values, attitudes, and impacts of human activity in the act of perpetuating, both also potentially reversing, species loss. In the wake of the sixth mass extinction, we explore the entangled social, ecological, and aesthetic problems presented by the prospect of species revival in the twenty-first century.
Members
BILL ADAMS, MEMBER
wa12@cam.ac.uk
Biography
I am a human geographer at the University of Cambridge. My work looks at the relations between people and non-human nature, using approaches drawn from both on political ecology and environmental history. I am currently particularly interested in the ways in which technologies shape understandings of nature and conservation imaginations. I have a book in press on the significance of genome editing for conservation.
SARAH BEZAN, founder & CO-CONVENOR
s.bezan@sheffield.ac.uk
Biography
I am an interdisciplinary scholar who researches literary and visual depictions of de-extinction science. My second book monograph (in progress) investigates how colonial histories and biotechnocapitalist fantasies have reshaped narratives of species loss and revival in relation to iconic species like the woolly mammoth, dodo, great auk, thylacine, Steller's sea cow, and Pinta island tortoise. My work in Extinction Studies began in 2016, when I undertook a paleo-dig at the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre (on Treaty 1 land in Southern Manitoba, the ancestral and traditional homeland of Anishinaabe people). During this dig, I unearthed an 80 million year old ancient marine reptile known as the mosasaur, the T-Rex of the sea. This experience became the basis for a prestigious British Academy Newton International Fellowship on paleoart and extinction, which I completed recently at The University of Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre.
MATTHEW CHRULEW, MEMBER
mchrulew@gmail.com
Biography
Matthew Chrulew is Senior Research Fellow in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University. He leads the Posthumanities, Animalities, Environments research program in the Centre for Culture and Technology. His essays have appeared in journals such as Angelaki, SubStance and Parallax, and his short stories have appeared in Cosmos magazine and Ecopunk! Speculative Tales of Radical Futures. He was founding associate editor of Environmental Humanities journal, and is the series editor of the new Edinburgh University Press book series, Animalities.
DAVID FARRIER, MEMBER
David.Farrier@ed.ac.uk
Biography
David Farrier is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils and Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction. He co-organizes the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network.
AMY LYNN FLETCHER, MEMBER
amy.fletcher@canterbury.ac.nz
Biography
CARRIE FRIESE, MEMBER
C.Friese@lse.ac.uk
Biography
My research is in medical sociology and science and technology studies, with a focus on reproduction across humans and animals. My initial research focused on the use of assisted reproductive technologies for human reproduction in the context of infertility, with a particular focus on ageing and motherhood. I then explored the development of interspecies nuclear transfer for endangered species preservation in zoos. Here I asked how notions of nature are being innovated in and through biotechnological development. Based on this research, I have also written and given talks on the ethics of de-extinction. I currently hold a Wellcome Trust New Investigator Award for the project “Care as Science: The Role of Animal Husbandry in Translational Medicine.” This five year project uses quantitative and qualitative research methods to ask how much and why scientists understand quality animal care as a scientific priority and how this shapes their work. I have also written and taught workshops on situational analysis and grounded theory, and have a general interest in relational research methods.
rebecca gordon, member
rebecca.a.gordon@zoho.com
Biography
Rebecca Gordon is an independent scholar whose research is situated in the conservation and care of contemporary art. She has recently turned to posthumanist notions of assisted evolution and de-extinction as a critical framework with which to expand strategies for the conservation and perpetuation of contemporary art. She is an Associate Lecturer (teaching) in the History of Art Department at University College London and is a guest lecturer at University of Glasgow.
CATHERINE GREENWOOD, member
cmgreenwood1@sheffield.ac.uk
Biography
Catherine Greenwood is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Gothic Studies at the University of Sheffield, and her practice-based research includes a focus on the shifting literary topography of an arctic sublime impacted by climate change. In recent years melting permafrost has unearthed extinct Pleistocene animals, resulting in cloning attempts and the commodification of mammoth tusks, and these unburials are the inspiration for Catherine’s eco-horror poetry sequence Siberian Spring.
ROSIE IBOTTSON, MEMBER
rosie.ibbotson@canterbury.ac.nz
Biography
EVE KASPRYZYCKA, member
eve.whhw@gmail.com
Biography
Eve Kasprzycka is a critical and creative writer who conducts her research out of the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her work examines the controversy of genetically modified animals intended for consumption and display as a unique window onto the making of nonhuman biotechnology in contemporary agri-business and de-extinction initiatives.
maria lux, member & CO-CONVENOR
marialux@gmail.com
Biography
Maria Lux is a research-driven visual artist whose work, broadly, centers on the relationship between animals and the generation of human knowledge. More specifically, her work over the past two years has focused on extinction narratives and the figure of the "endling" as a problematic locus for projecting fears about loneliness, an obsession with romantic love, and fantasies of violence (among other things). Her recent project Famous Monsters combines horror-punk music lyrics from the band The Misfits, the genres of horror comics and romance comics, and zombie-movie tropes in a graphic-narrative that tells the story of famous endlings who have returned from the dead as zombies. In line with the arguments of Nicole Seymour and Ursula K. Heise, Lux's work utilizes atypical (even "bad") strategies for thinking about environmental issues, like humor, horror, irreverence, and parody.
DOMINIC O’KEY, member
D.E.OKey@leeds.ac.uk
Biography
Dominic O'Key is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. There, he is workings on two projects about the cultural meanings of the Sixth Extinction. First, he is investigating heritage and biodiversity loss, focusing in particular on the relationship between natural history and mass extinction. Second, he is working on a monograph which asks how contemporary literature and literary forms engage with the simultaneous mass production and mass extinction of nonhuman life.
adam searle, member
aeds2@cam.ac.uk
Biography
I am a cultural geographer interested in extinction. My current work is grounded in the Pyrenees where I research the multiple afterlives of the bucardo—or Pyrenean ibex—the only extinct animal to have ever been 'brought back'. I contextualise the bucardo's story within contemporary restoration projects to understand the affective agencies of absence in ecological relations. My background is in ecological science and I am currently based in the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge.
lisa sideris, member
lsideris@indiana.edu
Biography
I am a scholar trained in religious studies with research interests in environmental/ethical issues at the intersection of science and religion. My recent work has focused on the implicitly religious nature of Anthropocene narratives and associated “age of human” technologies, including de-extinction strategies. My most recent book is Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (University of California Press, 2017). I am currently working on a book project tentatively titled Religion and World-Making: Techno-Environmentalism from Earthrise to Astrobiology that examines the religious impulse behind a variety of efforts to create or restore environments and organisms by hi-tech means.
stephanie turner, member
TURNERSS@uwec.edu
Biography
brit wray, member
hello@brittwray.com
Biography
Britt Wray, PhD is a science writer and broadcaster. She is the author of Rise of the Necrofauna: The Science, Ethics and Risks of De-Extinction (Greystone Books 2017) and is currently writing a book about the mental health impacts of the climate crisis (forthcoming from Knopf Random House). She has hosted CBC TV’s The Nature of Things, co-hosted the BBC podcast Tomorrow’s World, and hosted Canada’s national science radio show CBC Quirks and Quarks. Britt holds a PhD in Science Communication from the University of Copenhagen. She is also a TED speaker. Her TED Talk is called “How climate change affects your mental health”.
charlotte wrigley, member
c.a.wrigley@qmul.ac.uk
Biography
Charlotte Wrigley is a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Environmental and Technological History at the Higher School of Economics in St Petersburg. Her work sits at the intersection of new materialist studies of permafrost, Arctic geopolitics and techno-scientific responses to climate change. Her thesis researched the rewilding and de-extinction project ‘Pleistocene Park’ as a way to theorise both extinction and the Anthropocene as discontinuous processes.
INTERVENTIONS & SUBJECT AREAS
Settler colonialism; gender & sexuality studies; science & technology studies; human—animal studies; extinction studies; conservation biology; more-than-human geographies; animal capitalism; political ecology; environmental history; heritage, culture, and museology; digital technologies
topics & keywords
rewilding; genetic rescue; ecological restoration; Anthropocene aesthetics; cryopolitics; virtual revival
*Note: de-extinction is sometimes referred to as species revivalism, zombie biology, or resurrection biology.
LIVING BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bezan, Sarah. “A Posthumanist Critique of De-Extinction Science.” In Bioethics and the Posthumanities. Ed. Danielle Sands. London: Routledge, 2020 (In Press).
Bezan, Sarah. “Dodo Birds and the Anthropogenic Wonderlands of Harri Kallio.” Parallax, vol. 25, no. 4, 2019: 427-445.
Bezan, Sarah. “Regenesis Aesthetics: Visualizing the Woolly Mammoth in De-Extinction Science.” Antennae: Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, vol. 45, 2019, pp. 218-237.
Bezan, Sarah. “The Endling Taxidermy of Lonesome George: Iconographies of Extinction at the End of the Line.” Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology, vol. 27, no. 2, 2019, pp. 211-238. Co-Edited by Sarah Bezan and Susan McHugh.
Matthew Chrulew and Rick De Vos, eds. “Extinction,” special issue, Cultural Studies Review 25:1 (2019).
Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew, eds. Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
Matthew Chrulew, “Reconstructing the Worlds of Wildlife: Uexküll, Hediger, and Beyond,” Biosemiotics 13 (2020): 137–149.
Matthew Chrulew and Rick De Vos, “Extinction: Stories of Unravelling and Reworlding,” Cultural Studies Review 25:1 (2019): 23–28.
Matthew Chrulew and Rick De Vos, “Extinction,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies, ed. Lynn Turner, Ron Broglio and Undine Sellbach (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 181-197.
Matthew Chrulew, “Freezing the Ark: The Cryopolitics of Endangered Species Preservation,” in Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, ed. Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2017), pp. 283-305.
Matthew Chrulew, “Managing Love and Death at the Zoo: The Biopolitics of Endangered Species Preservation,” Australian Humanities Review 50 (2011): 137-157.
Matthew Chrulew, “Hunting the Mammoth, Pleistocene to Postmodern,” The Journal for Critical Animal Studies IX:1/2 (2011): 32-47.
Matthew Chrulew, “Reversing Extinction: Restoration and Resurrection in the Pleistocene Rewilding Projects,” Humanimalia: A Journal of Human/Animal Interface Studies 2:2 (2011): 4-27.
Despret, Vinciane. “Traits,” trans. Matthew Chrulew, Environmental Humanities 12:1 (2020): 186–189.
Despret, Vinciane. “It is an entire world that has disappeared,” trans. Matthew Chrulew, in Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations, ed. Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), pp. 217-222.
Friese C, Marris C (2014) Making De-Extinction Mundane? PLoS Biology 12(3): e1001825. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001825
O’Key, Dominic. 'Entering Life: Literary De-Extinction and the Archives of Life in Mahasweta Devi's Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha', Literature Interpretation Theory, vol. 31 (2020).
Searle, A. (2020). Anabiosis and the liminal geographies of de/extinction. Environmental Humanities 12.1: 321-45.
Searle, A. (2020). Absence. Environmental Humanities 12.1: 167-72.
Sideris, Lisa. “Grave Reminders: Grief and Vulnerability in the Anthropocene.” Religions. Special Issue, Faith in the Anthropocene, edited by Matthew Wickman and Jacob Sherman. June 27, 2020.
Sideris, Lisa. “Ethics of De-Extinction,” Extinction and Religion, edited by Jeremy Kidwell and Stefan Skrimshire (forthcoming, Indiana University Press).
Wray, Britt. Rise of the Necrofauna: The Science, Ethics and Risks of De-Extinction (Greystone Books 2017 in partnership with the David Suzuki Institute)
Wray, Britt. Bringing Back the Woolly Mammoth Has Already Had an Unintended Consequence NEO.LIFE (2018).
Wray, Britt. ‘De-extincting’ the mammoth is a real possiblity, say scientists – but why would we want to? i News (2017).
Wray, Britt. CRISPR May Prove Useful in De-Extinction Efforts The Scientist (2017).
Wray, Britt. Is Talking About De-Extinction a Moral Hazard? Nautilus (2017)
***Britt Wray’s press on de-extinction (for more visit https://www.brittwray.com/videos)
Britt Wray explains De-Extinction: How, Why and What if? WBEZ Nerdette Podcast
Featured in The Books We Loved in 2017, The New Yorker
Should We Bring Back an Extinct Species, Big Think
Rise of the Necrofauna, Guardian Books podcast
Rise of the Necrofauna listed as a "best science pick", Nature
Who Wants a Pet Dire Wolf? Perhaps a Passenger Pigeon?, WIRED
Book review, The Sunday Times
Book review, Globe and Mail
Start the Week – Animals Tamed, Exploited and Resurrected (in conversation with Amol Rajan, Alice Roberts, Gaia Vince and John Ewens), BBC Radio 4.
The art and science of resurrection, Literary Review of Canada
How to bring extinct species back to life (and why we may not want to), Salon
Rise of the Necrofauna, BBC Radio London
Should we bring extinct species back from the dead?, Deutsche Welle
The Science of Bringing Back Dead Animals: An Interview with Britt Wray, Hazlitt
Rise of the Necrofauna review, Quill and Quire
Science News Favorite Books of 2017
The Ethics of De-Extinction on Radio New Zealand
In Theory: What ethical questions come to mind over the ‘de-extinction’ movement?, LA Times
Resurrecting extinct species raises ethical questions, Science News
Author Britt Wray on the science and ethics of de-extinction, Canadian Geographic
The Rise of Necrofauna and the Ethical Dilemma of De-Extinction, Seeker
Discussions on de-extinction, Concordia University
Rise of the Necrofauna excerpt in The Scientist
The Possibilities of De-Extinction on the Influenced by Nature Podcast
The Inquisitive Biologist’s Review of Rise of the Necrofauna
Discussing de-extinction on the SIRIUSXM Arlene Bynon show
Rise of the Necrofauna interview, Turning Pages, University of Manitoba FM
Rise of the Necrofauna, Vancouver Co-op Radio’s Animal Voices
Interviewed on PRI Living on Earth about de-extinction
Rise of the Necrofauna, Global Morning News
Word of Wheeler podcast – Zombie Animals with Britt Wray
Is Extinction Really Forever? Science Borealis
Necrofauna on Green Majority Radio
Can De-Extinction Save Our Planet? EarthEasy
(Re)Born to be Wild, Life Imperative Podcast
Author interview, WICN Inquiry podcast
https://www.growbyginkgo.com/2020/06/23/the-loneliest-creature-in-the-world/
Wrigley, C. (in preparation). Ice and Ivory: Crisis conservation through cryopreservation. Journal of Political Ecology (special issue accepted).
Wrigley, C. (2020). Nine lives down: Love, loss and letting go in Scottish Wildcat Conservation. Environmental Humanities 12(1): 346:369.
Wrigley, C. (2018). It’s a bird! It’s a plane! An aerial biopolitics for a multispecies sky. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(4): 712–734.