In recent years, the field of human-animal studies has experienced an unprecedented growth. Indeed, the animal turn, as Harriet Ritvo called this paradigm shift, has promoted “new understandings of the role of animals in the past and at present.” Among other aspects, scholars have begun to explore the agency of animals and to discuss their influence on storytelling and the construction of knowledge. Given these developments and the emergence of human-animal studies as a distinct institutionalized discourse, it is somewhat surprising that the questions of how we teach human-animal studies and how this field may change didactics have received little attention.

Therefore, the symposium “Teaching Human-Animal Studies” aims to explore different ways of teaching human-animal studies in school and university classrooms. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the connections between teaching human-animal studies and

- animal auto/biographies
- interspecies communication
- literary, cinematic, and comic animal studies
- historical human-animal studies and animal historicity
- practices of human-animal relations
- animal spaces, animal places, and animal geographies
- the material turn in human-animal studies

We welcome papers addressing these issues from inter- and transdisciplinary angles as well as from across human-animal studies disciplines, including geography, anthropology, literary studies, art history, history, cultural studies, and philosophy.

The symposium, which is organized by Micha Edlich, Andreas Hübner, and Maria Moss, will be held at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg from January 23 to 25, 2020. Please send your abstract (in English or German) of no more than 300 words and a brief biography to nas@leuphana.de by August 1, 2019. Presentations will be 25 minutes followed by a discussion.

Select papers will be published.