Susan McHugh presents paper at Cosmopolitan Animals Conference in London

Susan McHugh, Ph.D., professor in the Department of English, delivered a paper titled “Let Penguins be Penguins: The Cosmopolitics of Birds as Wildlife Film Characters” at the Cosmopolitan Animals Conference, which convened in October in London.

The paper explores how critically and popularly successful nature films like March of the Penguins and Winged Migration both reflect and influence the growing significance of bird flocks to representing endangered populations of human as well as animal life at the turn of the twenty-first century.  It is an excerpt of McHugh's contribution to the essay collection Animals and the Moving Image, presently under review at Columbia University Press, and it is part of her ongoing investigation into the convergences of contemporary representations of genocide and extinction.