Department of English

The Anthropocene and Animal Studies working group is an affiliated working group. Affiliated working groups are coordinated and funded outside of the Department of English.

The Anthropocene and Animal Studies Reading Group assembles a diverse cohort of scholars, artists, and thinkers across a range of disciplines to interrogate the place of the human in a dynamic, uncertain, and multispecies world.

From the fungal to the elemental, the animal to the isotopic, this group trains a wide-angle lens on those creatures, things, and assemblages which constitute our unequally shared and never-just-human worlds. Our readings do not abandon the human altogether, but rather draw upon the urgency of the Anthropocene to examine the past, present, and future of humanity’s embeddedness within a complex relational web.  We recognize the environment as a site for human domination of marginalized beings, as well as a space for pluralistic understandings of nature, and a horizon for imagining new cosmologies and social formations.

We are a nascent cohort (founded in 2014) that meets monthly to discuss critical texts, and seeks to feature a wide range of scholarly and artistic perspectives. Although the group is primarily a forum for graduate students in the humanities and related social sciences, all are welcome to join the conversation. For the 2021-2022 academic year, our regular programming is on hiatus. If you are interested in working with us or being added to the listserv, feel free to reach out to Jacob Myers (jamyers@sas.upenn.edu) or the Anthropocene Group email (pennthropocene@gmail.com) for more information.