Humans: A Monstrous History
Join award-winning historian and author Surekha Davies as she explores why humans make monsters and what monsters tell us about humanity.
Her book "Humans: A Monstrous History" (University of California Press, 2025) tells a transregional history from antiquity to the present, revealing how people have categorized beings in and beyond the world, perceived otherness, and sought to control those who challenged social orders.
Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. Davies reveals how people have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how they invented race, gender, and nations along the way. With rich, evocative storytelling that braids together ancient gods and generative AI, Frankenstein’s monster and E.T., "Humans: A Monstrous History" shows how monster-making is about control: it defines who gets to count as normal.
Agenda
6pm–7pm | Lecture
7pm-8pm | Reception
Surekha Davies is an author, historian, and speaker. Her first book, "Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters" (Cambridge University Press, 2016), won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize and the Roland H. Bainton Prize. She has written about biology, anthropology, and monsters in the Times Literary Supplement, Nature, Science, and Aeon.
Event Links
Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/2868070-0
