Caroline Abbott

Book Review: Tooth and Claw: Top Predators of the World by Johnson, Gilman, Abel and Pullen

Caroline Abbott. Review of Johnson, Robert M.; Gilman, Sharon L.; Abel, Daniel C.; Pullen, Elise, Tooth and Claw: Top Predators of the World. H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. 3 May, 2024.

I am so pleased to share the publication of my first academic book review, and could not have been more delighted to have been selected for this text. This was a truly fulfilling read which will become a pillar of reference and enrichment in my own work for years to come. Many thanks to Prof. Daniella McCahey for her guidance and generosity as editor, to H-Environment for privileging me with the opportunity to speak to this important work, and to the creators of this volume for their combined expertise and dedication in assembling — and distilling — a fundamentally massive amount of knowledge and expertise at this pivotal climatological moment.

“At once academic and approachable in tone, the work achieves a rare and important balance between deep contextualization and engaging language that reflects greater authorial motivations: to present the most compelling recent biological scholarship about the predators represented in the work to the broadest possible audience in the interest of better “[sharing] and [caring] for their space” (p. 4). […] The work is an exercise in re-enchantment that presents predators as the thinking, feeling, sensing, beings they are on uncompromising terms, and an essential text for scholars seeking to expand their scientific literacy toward the development of holistic frameworks with which to render better portraits of predators. […] For environmental historians whose work has made them intimately familiar with the ways the historical legacy of life sciences is implicitly reliant on death, maltreatment, and exploitation of more-than-human beings, the work may also be an unexpected exercise in hope.“

CFP: Animal Encounters

A NiCHE Series in collaboration with the Animal Narrative, Identity, and Microhistory Archival Atlas (ANIMA), Ed. Prof. Heather Green and Caroline Abbott, Call for Participants, 5 April 2024.

”Historians’ interactions with animals in archival settings remains primarily human centered. When we locate animals in archival settings – whether accidentally or with purpose – we often learn more about human lives than we do about the lives of the animals represented. […] When we seek, find, or “encounter” an animal in archive, with or without expectation, how environmental historians respond dictates the representation of the ways more-than-human history are intertwined with our own. How can we do better by them? How can environmental and animal historians better account for, recognize, and address the histories of individual animal lives represented in archives? How might addressing the biographical details of archival animals assist in more comprehensive problematizations of the settler-colonial legacies with which they entangle? What is our responsibility towards centering these narratives? What does “good practice” look like, and how can we have productive conversations about this vital work?

In collaboration with the recent launch of the Animal Narrative, Identity, Microhistory and Archive Atlas (Anima), NiCHE invites submissions for our upcoming series, Animal Encounters. This series seeks contributions which continue and expand upon these vital conversations to further problematize and engage environmental historians’ nuanced interactions with archival animals.”

Heather and I are so looking forward to editing this exciting series together to follow the exciting conversations at our roundtable, “Animal Encounters in the Archive,” at ASEH 2024 in Denver! Please do get in touch with any questions.

American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) 2024:“Animal Encounters in the Archive” Roundtable 5-F

5 April, ASEH 2024 (3—7 April, 2024), Denver, Colorado. “This is (Sort Of) the Story of a Bear: On the Trail of K.1349, the Walsingham Expedition (1871 - 1872), Towards an Ecological Animal History.”

I am so thankful to the ASEH for the opportunity to share the story of K.1349, an American Black Bear killed during the Walsingham Expedition (1871—1872), and to detail one of the ways this history has enriched my thinking. I am deeply grateful for the support and camaraderie of our roundtable members Dr Isabelle Gapp (University of Aberdeen), Sean Cox (University of New Brunswick), and Javier Gonzalez Cortes (Rutgers University), as well as my co-organiser, Professor Heather Green, for their tremendous support in making our roundtable a welcoming venue for important conversations. The members of our roundtable would also like to express our deep appreciation for the gracious guidance of Professor Jack Bouchard, who helped us make the most of an exciting and busy time. My personal thanks are also due to the University of Cambridge’s Museum of Zoology, and to the Essig Museum at the University of California, Berkeley, for their generous provision of images for my presentation. During our roundtable, I had the pleasure of introducing a Call for Participants for an edited essay series which I will be co-editing with my roundtable co-organiser, Prof. Heather Green. Our series, “Animal Encounters,” to be published this summer (2024), aims to continue roundtable conversations. It is a joint effort between the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE) and the Animal Narrative, Identity, and Microhistory Archival Atlas (ANIMA), my first GIS project, which was beta launched at the conference.

We were absolutely humbled to see such a remarkable turnout. Our community privileged us with enriching discussion and great questions which made for a thought-provoking event! On behalf of all of us, many thanks to all for their active participation and enthusiasm. 

“Animal Encounters in the Archive” and other Canadian Environmental History in Colorado

In advance of the annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH)’s 2024 meeting in Denver, Colorado, NiCHE’s Daniel Macfarlane has kindly put together a comprehensive “round-up of all the Canadian content, as well as content being presented by scholars based in Canada, being presented at both the virtual and in-person ASEH.”

I have learned so much in co-organising “Animal Encounters in the Archive” with Prof. Heather Green, and we are both very grateful for the support of our fellow roundtable members in bringing this important conversation to life. Tremendous thanks are due to Sean Cox (doctoral student, University of New Brunswick), Dr. Isabelle Gapp (interdisciplinary research fellow, University of Aberdeen), Javier Gonzalez Cortes (doctoral student, Rutgers University), and Prof. Nancy Langston, our moderator.

Register for the conference, or read more on NiCHE’s “Canadian Environmental History at ASEH 2024,” at the links below.

See you in The Rockies!

NiCHE Editors’ Year-End Reading List 2023

A collaborative environment-themed list of recommended reading from the NiCHE editorial team to you, as compiled by Sara Spike. One of my favourite choices this year:

“Amy Kohout, Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers (University of Nebraska Press, 2023). Kohout’s work offers necessary and timely engagement with the biopolitical impact force of the American war machine, pushing the concept of frontier well beyond continental United States borders. Particularly, I am paying close attention to Kohout’s engagement with the specimen animals she discusses […] “

Thank you for supporting NiCHE!

With the support of our community, the Network in Canadian History and Environment raised over twelve thousand dollars (CAD) this year towards our annual fundraising goal. We met 77% of our goal in just one month: funds which will contribute to website hosting costs, our honoraria fund, graduate student conference travel funds, publishing costs for our peer-reviewed journal, PiCHE, and importantly, fair compensation for a part-time editor and social media manager whose work for NiCHE is absolutely vital to NiCHE, and to the environmental history community writ large. To read our “Thank You” post and learn more about the impact of these funds, or if you missed your chance this November and would like to contribute, please find the links below!

Thank you for remembering November for NiCHE, and to all the folks who have made this a wonderful year!

The Ecology of Fear: Or, The Plastic Prometheus (Concluding Ghost Light II: Monstrosities)

A conclusion to the second installment of the NiCHE series. 14 November, 2023

“Adjectives like “monstrosity,” are, to borrow another nineteenth century reference, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of the humanities: at once tremendously volatile and quite helpful, they share an embodiment of tremendous weight. Though the series was never billed as a strict problematisation of linguistics, the co-cultivated thematic space which resulted offers telling interlinkages with this term which can be used to understand current field engagement with “monstrous” other-than-human beings and their histories — and which encourage intersectional growth in existing frameworks.”

In order of publication, I am deeply grateful for the patience, time, dedication, labour, and care of Adrian Deveau, Janice Vis, Margaret Freeman, Ian Boes, Anna Soper, and Sonakshi Srivastava: thanks for choosing Ghost Light II, and NiCHE, as a home for your monsters! My thanks are also with our co-Editors in Chief, Dr. Jessica DeWitt and Prof. Heather Green for their guidance, and time in helping us explore the themes this series engaged with such care. As I enter my third term as a member of NiCHE’s editorial team and close this second chapter of Ghost Light, they and our contributors have once again reinvigorated my love for the ways environmental history can speaks to the world (including its wounds) in such unique ways.

“Axes on the Ground: Wolves and Women on the North American Frontier”

by Caroline Abbott | Arcadia, Autumn 2023, no. 19.

I am very pleased to share my first peer-reviewed article, published in Arcadia: Explorations in Environmental History, an “open-access, peer-reviewed journal for short, engaging environmental histories” via the Environment & Society Portal, a project of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. In it, I explore the means by which gendered evolutions of European lupine lore shaped settler conceptions of the boundaries between human and other-than-human predator on the North American frontier.

I am thankful to the editors at Arcadia and peer reviewers for their comprehensive and encouraging help in refining the work, and to Bucknell University’s Summer Institute on Non/Humanity 2022 for providing me with learning resources, funding, and an engaging environment in which I first workshopped the writing from which this work came. My thanks are also due to the Environmental Studies Association of Canada, whose May 2022 conference attendees were the first to hear an early version of this work under the title “‘But Being a Woman Facing the Most Desperate Odds’: Wolf Killing, Gender Heroism, and Canadian Mythologies in American Print Media 1880—1910.” Most of all, my thanks are due to the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE), and to the members of NEAR-EH, for their care, patience, encouragement, and effort in helping me learn.

“ON MONSTERS AS MARRIONETTE:” A Series introduction to Ghost Light II: Monstrosities

An introduction to the second installment of the NiCHE Series. 26 September, 2023.

“The fact that monsters are often “created to serve” of the systems, anxieties, and fears driving settler histories are, of course, not mutually exclusive to the practice of thinking with their Being, or of analysing the way the other-than-human moves through environmental history. But perhaps we should ask them what they are, just to be sure. [/] I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to curate the forthcoming selection of essays for Ghost Light II: Monstrosities, all of which will offer careful engagements with the monstrous, and will walk with our audiences through the coming season as time for reflection. Published this autumn (October and November) on NiCHE, the global reach of this competitive cohort offers contributions which consider, expand upon, and respond to the series prompt in diverse and exciting ways. Together, we will encounter the monstrous across six highly distinct ecologies, cover a multi-century scope, and witness the movement of an increasingly-strong, field-wide commitment to thinking with other-than-human experience of environmental history. Whether the essays in this series prompt readers to seek their own monsters in someone else’s research, or embolden them to encounter new and unfamiliar ones in their own, it is this re-encountering which this collection aims to record, and which I am confident these essayists have done with the utmost care.”

CFP: Ghost Light II: Monstrosities

A NiCHE Series, Ed. Caroline Abbott, Call for Participants, 15 August 2023.

What do environmental historians mean when we talk about the monstrous? The Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE) seeks contributions to Ghost Light II: Monstrosities which illuminate the relationships between other-than-human beings, folklore, and the environmental humanities. Prospective contributors are encouraged to propose ideas which align with these themes, propose their own topic adjacent to the original series CFP, or respond to any of the following prompts:

How do environmental historians encounter the monstrous in the stories we tell? How have human relationships with the monstrous, broadly conceived, changed over time — and what environmental factors dictated these changes?

If our notions of so-called “monstrosity” are themselves constructions, how can approaching “monstrous” beings benefit our understanding of environmental history? How can history benefit them?

How does problematising historical notions of “monstrosity” issue a challenge — or offer a place of respite — to those whose work engages the stories of both human and other-than-human beings and communities?

At our own climatological hour, so often cast as a “transformation,” how are the feelings of ‘anxiety, curiosity, fear, and hope’ we are learning to expect reflected in the faces of monsters new and old?

Please submit proposals of 250 words and a 100 word bio to abbott [.] caroline [.] ce [at] gmail [.] com by 6 September 2023. Contributors will be notified by 7 September. Series publication October — November 2023.

“My Mother Is Part Cow” — Emotional Ecologies Essay Series

The Otter, Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE), Emotional Ecologies Series, Ed. Jessica M. DeWitt and Sarah E. York-Bertram. 29 June 2023.

“The other-than-human tissue in her heart would heighten my every awareness of more-than-human intersection on those hospital grounds. […] In hospital, these sites of multi-species convergence restructured hope itself: no longer a “thing with wings” but a ruderal, undying being which sprung from every crack in bureaucracy in which it could entwine its roots, growing at the top of a skyscraper next to a helipad. [/] An awareness of my own experience as a carer amid these entangled, ecological realities has improved my approach to telling the more-than-human histories I now gravitate towards in my own work. Frameworks which consider emotion a bridge to peripheral and embodied natures not only offer perspective on the historical record and directly counter their often-human-centered narratives: they disclose a spectrum of entanglement and a magnitude of necessary work to better acknowledge more-than-human experience in the histories humans write.”

With tremendous gratitude to series editors and for the support of my family in writing this essay.

Northeast and Atlantic Region Environmental History Forum (NEAR-EH) 2023: Backyard NATURES

“The Coyotes of Crowell Road”. 23—25 June 2023. University of Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown, PEI.

The Northeast and Atlantic Region Environmental History Forum provides an annual opportunity for scholars to workshop book chapters and article-length papers on the environmental history of northeastern North America. [/] Each year, the forum is broadly focused on the history of human interaction with nature in the patch of North America from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the New Jersey Shore and inland to the Appalachian Mountains. Projects that meet this criteria are always welcome to be workshopped at this event, but this year the forum will also focus specifically on the environmental history of the “backyard”—that is, local, community-based environmental history. The intention is to create an edited collection with the “backyard” as the focus. A previous volume to come out of NEAR-EH workshopping was The Greater Gulf: The Greater Gulf: Essays on the Environmental History of the Gulf of St. Lawrence (McGill-Queens, 2020).

American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) 2023: Panel 9-K: TRACING ANIMALS THROUGH TIME AND SPACE

25 March 2023, ASEH 2023 (22—25 March, 2023), Boston, Massachusetts. “No Right on This Side of the Line:” Tracking the Geographic Queerness of C. latrans in American Print Media 1880—1915”

I am deeply grateful to the ASEH and its organisers for this opportunity to share my work, to learn from others, and to seek feedback on an avenue of data processing which I first began to explore and workshop via NEAR-EH at the University of Maine in June of 2022. Many thanks to my co-panellists, our session chair, Prof. Daniel Vandersommers, to my colleages at NiCHE, and to all who attended to discuss and engage on the use of intersectional methodologies and theoretical frameworks to constructively consider our relationships with other-than-human patterns of movement. I look forward to moving this project towards publication in the coming year and am very thankful for this opportunity to advance and enrich my frameworks!

“We Turned Our Eyes Away”: A Visual History of Nansen’s Dogs

The third installment of Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North — Part II, a NiCHE Series, ed. Dr Isabelle Gapp and Prof. Mark Cheetham. 19 January, 2023.

By examining the presence of dogs in the compositions of Fridtjof Nansen’s Farthest North (1897) with particular attention to his trek with expedition partner Fredrik Johansen, I explore the evolution of Nansen’s relationship with polar sledge dogs. Using visual culture to frame the arctic as a site of more-than-human history, I aim to exemplify the vital nature of art history frameworks to the proper contextualisation of animal histories which rely on nineteenth century print as source, and to further evidence the extent to which these approaches are to the benefit of more-than-human histories in the circumpolar North. Accounting for the presence of sledge dogs in these images alongside considerations for their compositional exclusion contributes to a better understanding for how visual culture can contribute more comprehensive examination of animal histories (and vice versa). In viewing history through this lense, I aim to remind our field that “where the human gaze turns away from the realities of other-than-human communities in service to the settler-colonial project,” — as it often does — “the visual record which exists is vital.“ Finally, I hope this contribution will make some small effort towards disrupting tendencies in study of polar exploration to center binary narratives of polar exploration — of success and failure; crisis and glory; starvation and excess — and encourage others to consider the more nuanced outcomes to exploration narratives which visual more-than-human histories provide. I hope that “the sight and sound of dogs reveals a future,” for environmental history, “as it did for Nansen, which disrupts the pursuit of so singular a scholarly outcome.”

I am as deeply thankful for the opportunity to learn from series editors Dr Gapp and Prof Cheetham as I am for their patience and care in helping me to expand my knowledge to tell this story. It is an honour to have contributed alongside fellow writers whose work is careful, nuanced, precise and impactful. Please read their work (linked below)!