Susan McHugh interviewed on BBC; gives keynote at Reading Animals conference in U.K.

Susan McHugh, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of English, spoke live on the BBC 3 Radio program “Free Thinking” on Tuesday, July 15, 2014, in conversation with host Matthew Sweet and novelist Karen Joy Fowler about the latter’s new bestseller We Are All Beside Ourselves.

Joining McHugh was Giovanni Aloi, editor in chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, for which McHugh serves on the academic advisory board.

McHugh elaborated on the relevance of Fowler's novel to the history of great apes raised in human families as well as the broader representational histories of non/human ape intimacy, including that in the Planet of the Apes stories, on which McHugh published an essay in the journal South Atlantic Review.

McHugh was in the U.K. to deliver a keynote presentation at the Reading Animals conference hosted by Sheffield University.  The first large-scale academic event to focus on animals in literature and culture, the conference featured over a hundred speakers from all over the world.

Listen to the BBC program

Read about the Reading Animals conference