Reading Marcy Norton's "The Tame and the Wild"

About This Event

We will meet to discuss the historian Marcy Norton’s book, The Tame and the Wild. Published in 2024, Norton’s book examines the “modes of interaction” through which Europeans and Indigenous Americans related to and engaged with nonhuman animals at the time of colonial encounter and afterwards, showing how their epistemologies and ontologies of other forms of life have led to our present ecological crisis. Selected by a majority of our members in an online poll, The Tame and the Wild offers the perfect inroad into a conversation about our shared interests. It brings together past and present animal studies scholarship and spans continents and centuries. Discussions of this book will help us articulate a common vocabulary and draw connections that will be used to group papers in a follow-up workshop. The meeting will conclude with a light lunch and a visit to Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology.

Co-sponsors

• History of Art, Cornell University