Speakers

Daniel J. Bowman is a PhD candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant in Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK.  His thesis, Horsepower: Animals in Automotive Culture, 1895–1935, explores the impact of the automobile on the lives of animals, both human and nonhuman, in U.S. literature and culture.  Daniel is a member of the Sheffield Animal Research Centre (ShARC), and his funding is provided by the White Rose College of Arts & Humanities (WRoCAH).

Alexander Clayton is a PhD student in History at the University of Michigan, researching the intersection of entertainment and natural science in the British Atlantic World. His dissertation explores the formation of animal collections in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, examining the ways in which living animals both exhibited and challenged enlightenment epistemologies and colonial hierarchies of expertise. Alexander gained his undergraduate degree in History at the University of St Andrews, and holds an MA in the History of Design from the Royal College of Art in London. Prior to his Ph.D, Alexander was Assistant Curator of Theatre and Performance at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Dr. Sarah Mead Leonard received her PhD in art history from the University of Delaware in 2020 and is now an independent scholar. Her research focuses on the intersections of art, design, and the natural world in the Victorian period.

Ramey Mize is both the Douglass Foundation Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in nineteenth-century U.S., Latin American, and Native American art and is currently at work on a dissertation tentatively titled “Battle Grounds: Painting, War, and Witness in American Visual Culture, 1861– 1901. This project illuminates artistic representations and challenges surrounding three conflicts that shaped American history—the U.S. Civil War, the Black Hills War, and the Spanish-Cuban American-Filipino War—and offers new, cross-cultural pathways for understanding the agency of art in bearing witness to geo-political violence in the Americas. 

Rebecca Olsen is a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Delaware whose research interests include nineteenth-century British literature and culture, environmental humanities, and print and material culture studies. Her dissertation, “Domestic Ecologies: Household Management and Environmental Entanglement in Nineteenth-Century British Literature,” examines women-authored texts which utilize household management activities to actively reimagine the domestic sphere. It brings together interdisciplinary approaches—including literary studies, environmental studies, and gender studies—to think through household management both as an entanglement of bodies and agents and as a means through which women imagined domestic relationships, identities, and possibilities. She is currently a Dissertation Fellow at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library for the spring 2021 semester.

Corey Ratch is a PhD candidate in art history at Columbia University specializing in interwar French and German art and photography. His dissertation addresses the impact of images of slaughtered animals, and how as production increased throughout the twentieth century, the slaughterhouse became increasingly removed from public view. This history in no small part helped pave the way for the contemporary factory farm and the current ecological crisis. His work focuses on depictions of nonhuman animals in art, how discourses of animality intersect with race, gender, and class, and how we are affected by images of violence and dismemberment.

Dr. Laurel Waycott is an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her PhD in history of science and medicine at Yale University in 2019, and holds an MA in the history of decorative arts, design, and culture from the Bard Graduate Center, and a BA in history of art and visual culture from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She studies the shared histories of science, medicine, and art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on the role of non-human organisms. A portion of this research, exploring the history of fancy goldfish breeding in Gilded Age America, was recently published in Winterthur Portfolio.

Marina Wells is a fourth-year PhD Candidate in the American & New England Studies Program at Boston University. Her dissertation, “Making Men from Whales: The Visual Culture of Gender and Whaling in New England, 1814-1861,” analyzes the ways in which whaling art—including prints, paintings, novels, and scrimshaw—problematized gender expression in nineteenth century America. Her research interests include gender and sexuality studies, oceanic studies, and American visual and material culture of the nineteenth century. She holds a BA from Colby College in Art History and Literature, and has held positions at various institutions including in the Health Humanities at BU, and at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Alex Zivkovic is a Ph.D. student in Art History at Columbia, where he studies modern art with a focus on Surrealism, early French film, and displays of natural history. He graduated from Stanford University in 2017 and has previously worked as a project research assistant for SFMOMA’s René Magritte: The Fifth Season (2018).