Hi! I just found this post on the forum by chance! If these was a message function I would message you. Sorry, hope you don't think I am rude. I see you last logged in on 11th June - so you might not even read this!
My PhD looks at exotic animals both living and dead in the eighteenth-century (Britain). Building on ideas like object biographies and eighteenth-century 'it-narratives' or 'novels of circulation' (18th century literary genre giving objects voices) l explore how these exotic animals were constructed as objects or 'things'. I look at ideas like animals as commodities, as political symbols, or as objects of sensory and emotional engagement. I track how the status of these animal objects changed over the long eighteenth-century. I look particularly at early museums and menageries. A lot of my work is concerned with eighteenth-century ideas about what constitutes an 'animal'. Whilst doing my PhD I have become increasingly interested in the cultural history of animal rights - and this has informed my own ideas about animals in the present.
What is your research on? :-)