The Animal Question: Trojan Horses, Palestine, and the Historian's Craft
Workshop
15.07.2025 18:15 – 20:00
Location: conference room, fourth floor, RCC
Guest Speaker: Tamar Novick
Prof. Dr. Tamar Novick, professor at the Technical University Munich, is a historian of science, technology, and the environment. She is the author of Milk and Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land (MIT Press, 2023).
Historical research is an inevitably incomplete practice, one that is deeply shaped by changing degrees of access to the past and to knowledge about it. The historian is compelled to navigate through various levels of territorial demarcations, gatekeeping, and censorship. As this talk will demonstrate, environmental history offers a particularly good compass for this act of navigation, and choosing animals as historical subjects allows to penetrate chronological, epistemological, and institutional walls. Focusing on twentieth-century Palestine*Israel and the different animal regimes that defined this territory, the talk will supply insights about the historian’s craft and her responsibilities concerning the past and the present. The discussion will be accompanied by a screening of artist Shadi Jamil Habib Allah’s short film Between Six Corners.