Agenda

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ANIMALS AND COLONIALISM
Virtual lecture series organized and moderated by Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond (University of California, San Diego) and Federica Timeto (Ca’Foscari University, Venice), in collaboration with the Environmental Humanities Degree at Ca’ Foscari University. 
Co-funded by DFBC; in collaboration with CRITT and Valentina Bonifacio (DSU)

Milk and Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land
Tamar Novick, Technical University of Munich

Milk and Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land is an environmental history of the state that centers on the intersection of technology and religion in modern Palestine/Israel. It focuses on animals and the management of their production and reproduction across three political regimes (the late-Ottoman rule, British rule, and the early Israeli state), demonstrating how settlers and state experts used agricultural technologies to recreate a biblical idea of past plenitude—literally a “land flowing with milk and honey”—through the humanimal body. Novick presents a series of case studies involving the management of water buffalo, bees, goats, sheep, cows, and people. She traces the intimate forms of knowledge and bodily labor—production and reproduction—in which this process took place, and the intertwining of bodily, political, and environmental realms in the transformation of Palestine/Israel. 

Tamar Novick is an assistant professor of the history of technology in the STS Department at the Technical University of Munich. Her research lies at the intersection of history of technology, environmental history, animal studies, waste, and Middle East studies. She holds a PhD from the History and Sociology of Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, and was a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, where she led a working group on animals and knowledge.

April 15 @ 5:30-7 CET, CFZ Zattere Venice and online
11.30 p.m. ET; 00:30 a.m. JST [April 16]; 1:30 a.m. AEST [April 16]

Registration link

Image credits: Zoltan Kluger, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons