Historicising the Non-Human

Global History and Culture Centre Conference

Monday 8th and Tuesday 9th June 2026

Oculus Building, University of Warwick

Keynote

Professor Marcy Norton (University of Pennsylvania)

Overview

In recent years, the discipline of history has witnessed a return to the idea of "non-human" agency. Prompted in part by the rise of environmental history, an increasing number of scholars once again seek to foreground the "agency" of various non-human actors—animals, plants, mushrooms, rivers, mountains, and alike. This theoretical approach, of course, is not new. The first wave of academic work on non-human agency emerged as part of science and technology studies (STS) in the early 1980s. Scholars such as Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, amongst others, sought to complicate the traditional categories of social history by multiplying the number of "actants". The signifiance of the non-human was then further reinforced following the rise of the "ontological turn" amongst anthropologists in the 1990s, particularly through the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and more recently Anna Tsing. Taking non-human agency seriously is therefore part of a well-established tradition within both history and the humanities more generally.

This conference brings together historians to reflect critically on the category of the "non-human". In recent scholarship, there is sometimes a tendency to invoke "non-human agency" with little theoretical reflection or acknowledgement of the longer historiography and associated debates. Alongside this, we lack a clear historical account of the development of thinking about non-human agency prior to the 1980s.

The premise of this conference is that we need to properly historicise the concept of non-human agency. This is an important first step for developing a more rigorous analytical account of the place of non-humans in different historical contexts. Plenty of people in the past, well before the 1980s, and in different societies around the world, thought that non-humans mattered, that they had "agency". This conference seeks to recover that longer history of thinking about non-human agency; that is, to historicise the non-human.

Speakers

Adam Bobbette (University of Glasgow)

Anna Bruins (University of Warwick)

Rosie Charles (University of Warwick)

Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh (University of Amsterdam)

Shreya Khaund (University of Warwick)

Davide Martino (Université libre de Bruxelles)

Claire Shaw (University of Warwick)

Meriç Tanık (University of Warwick)

Organisers

James Poskett (University of Warwick) and Tom Simpson (University of Warwick)

Funding

The conference is kindly supported by the British Academy and Wolfson Foundation.