Panelists:
Holly Hughes (Art & Design, Theatre & Drama, Women's Studies)
Clare Croft (Dance)
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes (American Culture, Women's Studies)
Irina Aristarkhova (Art & Design, Women's Studies)

We all have an animal story—the pet we loved, the wild animal that captured our childhood imagination, the deer the neighbor hit while driving. While scientific breakthroughs in animal cognition, the effects of global climate change and dwindling animal habitats, and the exploding interdisciplinary field of animal studies have complicated things, such stories remain a part of how we tell the story of being human.

"Animal Acts: Performing Species Today" (University of Michigan Press, 2014) is a collection of animal themed performance scripts by influential artists including Rachel Rosenthal, Deke Weaver, Joseph Keckler, Carmelita Tropicana and Holly Hughes accompanied by commentaries by leading scholars in the fields of animal and performance studies. The anthology foregrounds questions of race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, and other issues central to the human project within the discourse of the “post human.”

This is part of our Gender: New Works, New Questions series, which features new works by U-M faculty that engage gender and sexuality.