Susan Crane is the Parr Professor Emerita in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She specializes in English and French medieval literature and culture. Crane’s current research explores medieval interspecies relationships and the contributions of animal studies to environmental studies. Starting from the perspective that all cultures are inter-species enterprises, she focuses on how humans have defined themselves in relation to other animals, where communities draw on and depend on their physical surroundings, and what webs of interdependence enmesh humans with other forms of life, technologies, and materialities. Her publications in these areas include Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain (U of Pennsylvania, 2012); “A Cautionary Elephant” (Shakespeare Studies, 2013); and “Medieval Animal Studies: Dogs at Work” (Oxford Handbooks Online, 2015).
Professor Crane will be talking about the weird and wonderful world of medieval Bestiaries. For an introductory preview, the following sites are recommended: http://bestiary.ca/index.html, or the Aberdeen Bestiary site, https://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/