Deadline: 18.10.2026

The Nonhuman City: Wounded Animals and the Development of Urban Modernity

Call for Abstracts for a Conference in Genoa, Italy, on September 7–10, 2027. Deadline: October 18, 2026

The modern city was built, in no small part, on the bodies of nonhuman animals. Its streets were paved and goods transported through the labour of horses and other draught and pack animals; its expanding populations were fed by the hidden machinery of the industrial slaughterhouse; its parks enclosed exotic creatures behind iron bars for the edification and amusement of its citizenry; its sewers and back alleys were colonized by rats and pigeons whose presence was managed, moralized, and even racialized. Yet the history of urban modernity has largely been written as though the nonhuman animals who inhabited, powered, and were consumed by the modern city were incidental to its story, or no part of it at all. 

This panel takes as its point of departure the transformation of European and global cities from the mid nineteenth century onward, with particular attention to the ways in which processes of urban modernization reorganized, displaced, concealed, and reimagined the nonhuman animal lives that had long been woven into the fabric of urban existence. But one example is how the banishment of slaughterhouses and related trades to the margins rendered animal death invisible in the name of hygiene and the so-called “civilizing process,” producing an organized forgetting of the lives and deaths that powered the modern city. 

This panel invites papers that take seriously the nonhuman animal as a subject of urban history, attending to the full range of creatures whose presence in and relationship to the modern city has been shaped by, and has in turn shaped, the processes of urban transformation. Who, and what, has been allowed to inhabit urban space, on what terms, and at what cost? It examines how animal bodies and lives have been managed, exploited, displaced, aestheticized, exterminated, and mourned, and what has been suppressed or rendered invisible in these processes. Particular attention is given to the racialized and discriminatory dimensions of urban animal management, including the association of “vermin” with marginalized, racialized, and immigrant communities. The reorganization of urban space in relation to nonhuman animals was a global process shaped by colonial encounters, imperial networks, and local and Indigenous histories. We therefore welcome contributions addressing cities in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and beyond, and engaging critically with colonial and postcolonial contexts. 

Topics may include the history of the slaughterhouse and other animal industries; the displacement of working animals by technological change (for instance, the replacement of horses by automobiles); the zoo as a site of imperial knowledge production; urban hygiene and the extermination of “pest” species; and representations of urban animal life. Methodologically, the panel welcomes interdisciplinary approaches spanning history, art history, urban studies, environmental humanities, and postcolonial and decolonial critique.

 

How to submit

Call for Abstracts (PDF)

 

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