Wednesday, 9 March
14:00 – 15:00 Registration
15:00 – 15:30 Introduction, Mieke Roscher and André Krebber
15:30 – 17:00 1st Panel: Animal Biography as Challenge
Chair: André Krebber, University of Kassel
15:30 – 15:50 Finding a man and his horse in the archive:
the failure of an historian’s dream?
Hilda Kean, University of Greenwich, London
15:50 – 16:10 There’s an Elephant in the Concert Hall: Audience and Agency
Martin Ullrich, Nuremberg University of Music
16:10 – 16:30 “Birds that are deserving of mention”: The Search for Pigeon
Selfhood in British Pigeon Fancying, c.1850-1939
Kate Whiston, University of Nottingham
17:00 – 17:30 Break
17:30 – 18:00 Unknown Parrot with Princess
Mathias Antlfinger, Ute Hörner, Academy of Media Arts Cologne
Keynote Lecture:
18:30 – 20:00 Taxidermy’s Biography
Susan McHugh, University of New England, Portland, ME
Venue: Gießhaus of the Universität Kassel, Mönchebergstr. 5
Reception
Thursday, 10 March 2016
09:00 – 10:30 2nd Panel: Collective Animals – Collective Biographies?
Chair: Hilda Kean, University of Greenwich, London
09:00 – 09:20 Can the Subaltern Bark, Neigh, Growl, Howl, and Meow?
The Challenges and Promise of Animal Biography
Aaron Skabelund, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT
09:20 – 09:40 “We know them all.“ Does it make sense to create a collective biography of European bison?
Markus Krzoska Justus Liebig University Gießen
09:40 – 10:00 Biographies of companion species: Polish Hounds and their people
Magdalena Dąbrowska, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University,
Lublin
10:30 – 11:00 Coffee break
11:00 – 12:30 3rd Panel: Constructing Animal Identities
Chair: Matthew Chrulew, Curtin University, Perth.
11:00 – 11:20 The Elephant’s I
Radhika Subramaniam, Parsons School of Design/ The New School, New York City, NY
11:20 – 11:40 Postscript, Posthuman: Werner Herzog's Crocodile at the End of the World
Dominic O’Key, University of Leeds
11:40 – 12:00 Animal Biographies: Cesar – A fictional biography of a hu-manimalistic creature
Daniel Wolf, University of Kassel
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch break
14:00 – 15:30 4th Panel: Animal Subjectivities/The Human Gaze
Chair: Aaron Skabelund, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT
14:00 – 14:20 Animal Biographies on Social Media
Margo DeMello, Canisius College, Buffalo, NY & Animals and Society Institute, Washington, D.C.
14:20 – 14:40 Animal Voices in Modernist Fiction: Empathy in Life Writings of Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann
Alexandra Böhm, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg
14:40 – 15:00 Inscribed Narratives: Marking Animals via Marking Women in Contemporary Crime Fiction
Rebekah Humphreys, University of Wales
Kate Watson, University of Cardiff
15:30 – 16:00 Coffee break
16:00 – 18:00 5th Panel: Animal Selves
Chair: Martin Ullrich, Nuremberg University of Music
16:00 – 16:20 Animal Life Stories; or, the Making of Animal Subjects in Primatological Narratives of Fieldwork
Mira Shah, University of Berne
16:20 – 16:40 Me, Chimpanzee: Primate Selves Between Science and Fiction
Smilla Ebeling, Michaela Koch, University of Oldenburg
16:40 – 17:00 Animal Biographies in the Zoo
Matthew Chrulew, Curtin University, Perth
17:00 – 17:20 Autozoographies – Narrating Animal Life from a First-Person Perspective
Frederike Middelhoff, University of Würzburg
Conference dinner
Friday, 11 March 2016
09:00 - 10.30 6th Panel: Individualizing Animals through Biographical Narration
Chair: Mieke Roscher, University of Kassel
9:00 – 9:20 Animal Biographies in Graeco-Roman Literature?
Thorsten Fögen, Durham University
9:20 – 9:40 Topsy, An Elephant We Must Never Forget
Kim Stallwood, Hastings
9:40 – 10:00 Recurrence of the Same Thing: How Russi Marc Returns
Jean Marie Carey, University of Otago, Dunedin
10:30 – 11:00 Coffee break
Final discussion
11:00 – 12:00 Chair: Michael Mecklenburg, University of Kassel
Commentary by Gesine Krüger, University of Zurich