Philip Howell
Biographic Data
| ID | 78124 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Philip Howell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Philip |
| FAMILY NAME | Howell |
| SIGNATURE | HOWELL P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4673-6422 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 213 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 54 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Space and Literary Studies
Recoding motherliness and femininity in the Plague Tale game series
This article presents a feminist critical reading of the Plague Tale game series, addressing the lack of complex portrayals of mothers and mothering in games. Through close reading using Ruddick’s maternal thinking framework as an analytical lens, it focuses on how narrative, gameplay, and character design depict player-character Amicia’s ‘motherly sister’ role, positioning motherliness as a uniquely feminine strength. Particular attention is giv…
Foucault, Parrhesia and the politics of presence: On Not Speaking Truth to Power
This paper considers the take-up by geographers and others of Foucault's late work on parrhesia, the ancient Greek concept of frank or fearless speech. While there has been productive work on its genealogy and geographies, parrhesia has been commonly translated as 'speaking truth to power' and discussion has centred around resistance. This paper argues that 'speaking truth to power' selects and simplifies the range of practices considered in Fouc…
Animals’ Mobilities in Popular Fiction: Time, Duration, and Desire in Sheila Burnford’s The Incredible Journey
In Sheila Burnford’s 1961 novel The Incredible Journey, three domestic animals undertake an arduous trek through the forests of northern Ontario to be reunited with their owners and family. As an example of “homing instinct” stories, The Incredible Journey has been influential, notably as a result of the 1963 Disney film. The genre is easily dismissed as sentimentally anthropomorphic, but this paper treats Burnford’s novel as a sophisticated trea…
Victims of Fashion: Animal Commodities in Victorian Britain
Caring and Coping in the City of Dogs: Review of Chris Pearson, Dogopolis: How Dogs and Humans Made Modern New York, London, and Paris
Review of Chris Pearson, Dogopolis: How Dogs and Humans Made Modern New York, London, and Paris. Animal Lives. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2021. 259 pp.; 21 illus. $24.00 (pb), $95.00 (hb
Landscapes of Detectorists
The BBC TV series Detectorists (three seasons, 2014–2017) is the kind of unassuming British comedy that invariably attracts words like gentle, offbeat, or indeed unassuming. It is the story of two
Black Protest and the Man on Horseback: Race, Animality, and Equestrian Counter-Conduct
This paper explores the history and political significance of black horsemen and horsewomen, using the appearance of mounted protesters at the 2020 Black Lives Matter rallies in the US to consider the role of the horse as both an adjunct of authority, in symbol and in material power, and as a partner in forms of protest and resistance. This paper begins with the brute power of the horse, and through its military and policing duties, its role supp…
The curious case of the Croydon cat-killer: Producing Predators in the Multi-Species Metropolis
From September 2015, the deaths of hundreds of pet cats in Croydon, London and the UK have been attributed to the actions of one or more killers. In September 2018, the police operation to catch the ‘Croydon cat killer’ was called off, with the deaths attributed to the actions of cars and foxes. This paper considers what the case says about our relations with other animals in the city, why we accept some animal deaths as normal, and others unnatu…
Developing an Empathy Spectrum for Games
Games often encourage players to feel empathy for characters or scenarios by design. However, the term ‘empathy’ is often misunderstood and used in a variety of contexts as a substitute for feelings of sympathy, pity and compassion. This article defines a distinction between these similar terms and uses their definitions to describe how players emotionally engage with a game. This helps define an empathy spectrum, ranging from pity to compassion,…
From the Dawn Chorus to the Canary Choir: Notes on the Unnatural History of Birdsong
Birdsong is familiar but enigmatic: to some nothing but mechanical “instinct,” but so excessively exuberant that enthusiasts have linked the songs of birds to the development of the aesthetic sense. Where medieval scholars once saw the origins of music in the imitation of nature, by the Enlightenment birdsong was banished in the anthropocentric definition of art. In contrast to the philosophers, this paper focusses on human intervention in birdso…
The Trouble with Liminanimals
How does the concept of liminality help us to conceptualize the borderlands between humans and animals? From one angle, the answer is straightforward enough, as the purpose of all theories of limin
Edmund Russell. Greyhound Nation: A Coevolutionary History, 1200–1900
Edmund Russell pitches Greyhound Nation: A Coevolutionary History, 1200–1900 as a novel way of understanding the history of animals’ relationships with human beings, with the potential to revolutionize not just animal history but social, labor, and environmental history as well. This can only be done, argues Russell, through a reconciliation of history with evolutionary science. Evolution should no longer be restricted to “deep history,” nor be p…
Writing in animals in history
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the connections between animals and nationalism, and specifically the role of nonhuman animals in the propagation of &s;national&s; histories. It focuses on the business of collective memory, or rather more precisely cultural memory , asking which animals are remembered, which animals forgotten, and why. The book explor…
The triumph of animal history?
This chapter focuses on the methods of animal–human history, first of all in response to suggestions that animal–human history is in the end not wholly compatible with an &s;animal turn&s; that has turned decisively against anthropocentrism. It discusses the &s;mainstreaming&s; of animal studies, including the rise of animal–human history, has been succeeded by a self-consciously &s;critical&s; animal studies movement that views such academic nor…
Hunting and animal–human history
The antiquity and ubiquity of hunting is everywhere acknowledged. Feminist anthropologists have been especially keen to demolish the myth of &s;Man the hunter&s;, because of its apparent naturalisation of gender dualisms and hierarchies in &s;the male-centred hunting story&s;, as Donna Haraway puts it. In Robert Ardrey&s;s words, hunting conferred upon humans momentous and irrevocable consequences, making the human being a truly &s;cultural anima…
Animals, agency, and history
Rene Descartes views on animals are readily simplified, even traduced, but the standard interpretation of the Cartesian method has not been much more than modified. Human sovereignty arguably descends from the very possibility of a property right in animals, conferring as it does so an historical life that is denied to those constitutive others who possess only a brute, creaturely, existence. In social theory and social history, to take a differe…
The Drunkard’s Nose: Making and Unmaking the Person in Trollope’s “The Spotted Dog”
This article discusses the significance of the literary techniques used to characterize the problem of drunkenness and the figure of the “drunkard” in Anthony Trollope’s short story “The Spotted Dog” (1870). “The Spotted Dog” is in most aspects a conventional account of the dangers of drink, but the story nonetheless dramatizes the process by which we arrive at ethical judgments about drinking subjects. Trollope offers the character Julius Macken…
The Routledge Companion to Animal–Human History
Medicine is, by definition, a human-led endeavour. While animals have always suffered from disease, they only became participants in human and veterinary medicine when humans began to pay attention to their health and attempt to learn about and intervene in it. Historical analysis shows that this occurred particularly when human interests were threatened by the state of animal health, and when humans perceived benefits to arise from understanding…
The dogs that didn't bark in the Blitz: Transpecies and transpersonal emotional geographies on the British home front
Animal History in the Modern City: Exploring Liminality
Animals are increasingly recognized as fit and proper subjects for historians, yet their place in conventional historical narratives remains contested. This volume argues for a history of animals based on the centrality of liminality - the state of being on the threshold, not quite one thing yet not quite another. Since animals stand between nature and culture, wildness and domestication, the countryside and the city, and tradition and modernity,…
Modernity
Modernity as a multifaceted concept can be defended from its critics, and its continuing utility asserted. This entry examines it through a tripartite focus on modernity as project , focusing on technical achievements; modernity as discourse , focusing on its cultural specificity and contestable claims; and modernity as experience , focusing on questions of popular consciousness and identity. Emphasis is placed not only on geographical studies ca…
Thinking the commons
The commons have been described as a drama, even a 'tragedy'. Their fate, their future, has never seemed more parlous, with climate change, population growth, and competition for scarce resources seemingly threatening greatest common property. This chapter shows that the contemporary commons as both being lost in old shapes and recovered in new forms, as a contested and dynamic domain of collective existence, with the balance between the rapaciou…
Releasing the Commons: Rethinking the futures of the commons
Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain: Zoos, Collections, Portraits, and Maps
Public Space and the Public Sphere: Political Theory and the Historical Geography of Modernity
This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion of the historical geography of modernity. It is argued that the exclusive focus on social theory has detrimental effects on the appreciation of normative political concerns and that it ignores the resurgence of normative political theory. Habermas's concept of the public sphere, and its place within his theoretical and empirical studies, is, by contrast, commendably concerned with linking the socia…
Prostitution and Racialised Sexuality: The Regulation of Prostitution in Britain and the British Empire before the Contagious Diseases Acts
In this paper I examine the interplay of race and sexuality in 19th-century British colonial legislation concerning prostitution. I demonstrate that British systems of regulation of prostitution predated the introduction of the Contagious Diseases Act in 1864, and that rather than spreading from Britain to its colonies regulationist measures developed from the interplay of metropolitan-colonial relations. The example of Hong Kong serves to illust…
A Place for the Animal Dead: Pets, Pet Cemeteries and Animal Ethics in Late Victorian Britain
The recent 'animal turn' in geography has contributed to a critical examination of the inseparable geographies of human and non-human animals, and has a clear ethical dimension. This paper is intended to explore these same ethical issues through a consideration of the historical geography of petkeeping as this relates to the death and commemoration of favourite household animals. The emergence of the pet cemetery, towards the end of the 19th cent…
The Routledge Companion to Animal–Human History
Medicine is, by definition, a human-led endeavour. While animals have always suffered from disease, they only became participants in human and veterinary medicine when humans began to pay attention to their health and attempt to learn about and intervene in it. Historical analysis shows that this occurred particularly when human interests were threatened by the state of animal health, and when humans perceived benefits to arise from understanding…
Race, space and the regulation of prostitution in Colonial Hong Kong
The geography of the regulation of sex work in colonial Hong Kong is examined as a contribution to the historiography of the colonial city. Particular attention is paid to racial and sexual segregation and their relation to Foucauldian concepts of discipline and regulated sexuality. The introduction and revision of Venereal Disease Ordinances, and the landscape of regulated prostitution that resulted, are read as part of a mid-nineteenth-century …
Managed zones for sex workers in Liverpool: Contemporary proposals, Victorian parallels
Recent proposals to establish a ‘managed zone’ for female street sex workers in Liverpool are placed in this paper in historical and geographical context. Liverpool is shown to be an exemplar of a late Victorian municipal management of prostitution that was just as firmly committed to the containment and ‘localisation’ of sex work. This model is contrasted with alternative municipal strategies, and set within a national legislative agenda increas…
The Dog Fancy at War: Breeds, Breeding, and Britishness, 1914-1918
This essay examines the impact of the Great War on the breeding and showing of pedigree dogs (the “dog fancy”) in Britain. Hostility toward Germany led first to a decline in the popularity of breeds such as the dachshund, with both human and canine “aliens” targeted by nationalist fervor. Second, the institutions of dog breeding and showing came under threat from accusations of inappropriate luxury, frivolity, and the wasting of food in wartime, …
A private Contagious Diseases Act: Prostitution and public space in Victorian Cambridge
Crime and the City Solution: Crime Fiction, Urban Knowledge, and Radical Geography
Radical urban geography has recently begun a critique of crime fiction, seeing its ideological shortcomings as politically instructive. This paper argues that this critique is theoretically naive and suggests that a concentration on the epistemological claims of both fiction and urban geography is more fruitful. The paper turns the critique back on radical geography and celebrates the critical possibilities of some forms of crime fiction. Specifi…
The dogs that didn't bark in the Blitz: Transpecies and transpersonal emotional geographies on the British home front
Animal History in the Modern City: Exploring Liminality
Animals are increasingly recognized as fit and proper subjects for historians, yet their place in conventional historical narratives remains contested. This volume argues for a history of animals based on the centrality of liminality - the state of being on the threshold, not quite one thing yet not quite another. Since animals stand between nature and culture, wildness and domestication, the countryside and the city, and tradition and modernity,…
Venereal disease and the politics of prostitution in the Irish Free State
This article is intended primarily as a contribution to work on the regulation of sexuality in modern Ireland, but, more generally, it attempts to situate the Irish experience within a wider problematic concerning the relations of state and society in the regulation of prostitution. The regulation of sexuality in early twentieth-century Ireland has been a focus of concern for feminist historians in particular, and recent work has clearly demonstr…
Time-geography, gentlemen, please: Chronotopes of publand in Patrick Hamilton's London trilogy
This paper considers the time and the place of drinking in modern British life, as represented in Patrick Hamilton’s trilogy of novels set in the publand of London’s West End in the interwar years, and through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope and with critical nods to Hagerstrand’s timegeography corpus. The chronotopes of pubs and their neighbourhoods, which we term ‘publand’, are discussed initially in their novelistic presentation in…
Sexuality, sovereignty and space: Law, government and the geography of prostitution in colonial Gibraltar
Diffusing the light of liberty”: The geography of political lecturing in the Chartist movement
Afterword: Remapping the terrain of moral regulation
The aspiration towards universality in political theory and political geography
Visions of the people: Industrial England and the question of class
Black Protest and the Man on Horseback: Race, Animality, and Equestrian Counter-Conduct
This paper explores the history and political significance of black horsemen and horsewomen, using the appearance of mounted protesters at the 2020 Black Lives Matter rallies in the US to consider the role of the horse as both an adjunct of authority, in symbol and in material power, and as a partner in forms of protest and resistance. This paper begins with the brute power of the horse, and through its military and policing duties, its role supp…
John Pope Hennessy and the Translation of 'Slavery' between late nineteenth-century Barbados and Hong Kong
This paper uses the experiences of Sir John Pope Hennessy (1834‐91) as Governor of Barbados (1875‐76) and Hong Kong (1877‐82) to investigate the political geography of British imperial government in the later nineteenth century. Pope Hennessy's postings brought him into conflict with successive white settler elites, as he attempted to forward both colonial policy and his own humanitarian and political concerns. Two consecutive episodes demonstrat…
Sex and the city of bachelors: Sporting guidebooks and urban knowledge in nineteenth-century Britain and America
Guidebooks to brothels and prostitutes flourished in mid-nineteenth century Britain and America, particularly in the great cities of London and New York. This paper treats such guides as a form of imaginative mapping, associated with a ‘sporting’ male culture of sexually predatory men and an ideal city of male sexual opportunity. Such guidebooks offered to their readers a particular form of urban knowledge, primarily through the construction of t…
The curious case of the Croydon cat-killer: Producing Predators in the Multi-Species Metropolis
From September 2015, the deaths of hundreds of pet cats in Croydon, London and the UK have been attributed to the actions of one or more killers. In September 2018, the police operation to catch the ‘Croydon cat killer’ was called off, with the deaths attributed to the actions of cars and foxes. This paper considers what the case says about our relations with other animals in the city, why we accept some animal deaths as normal, and others unnatu…
From the Dawn Chorus to the Canary Choir: Notes on the Unnatural History of Birdsong
Birdsong is familiar but enigmatic: to some nothing but mechanical “instinct,” but so excessively exuberant that enthusiasts have linked the songs of birds to the development of the aesthetic sense. Where medieval scholars once saw the origins of music in the imitation of nature, by the Enlightenment birdsong was banished in the anthropocentric definition of art. In contrast to the philosophers, this paper focusses on human intervention in birdso…
Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India, and Australia
Concubines and power: Five hundred years in a northern Nigerian palace
Visions of the people: Industrial England and the question of class
Regions and Industries: A Perspective on the Industrial Revolution in Britain
(1991). Regions and Industries: A Perspective on the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Economic Geography: Vol. 67, No. 2, pp. 167-169
Public Space and the Public Sphere: Political Theory and the Historical Geography of Modernity
This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion of the historical geography of modernity. It is argued that the exclusive focus on social theory has detrimental effects on the appreciation of normative political concerns and that it ignores the resurgence of normative political theory. Habermas's concept of the public sphere, and its place within his theoretical and empirical studies, is, by contrast, commendably concerned with linking the socia…
The aspiration towards universality in political theory and political geography
Diffusing the light of liberty”: The geography of political lecturing in the Chartist movement
Bureaucracy
Crime and the City Solution: Crime Fiction, Urban Knowledge, and Radical Geography
Radical urban geography has recently begun a critique of crime fiction, seeing its ideological shortcomings as politically instructive. This paper argues that this critique is theoretically naive and suggests that a concentration on the epistemological claims of both fiction and urban geography is more fruitful. The paper turns the critique back on radical geography and celebrates the critical possibilities of some forms of crime fiction. Specifi…
A private Contagious Diseases Act: Prostitution and public space in Victorian Cambridge
John Barrell. Imagining the King's Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793-1796
Book Review| September 01 2000 John Barrell. Imagining the King's Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793-1796 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xvii + 737. $115. ISBN 0-19-811292-0. Peter Howell Peter Howell Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Eighteenth-Century Life (2000) 24 (3): 103–111. https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-24-3-103 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permi…
Prostitution and Racialised Sexuality: The Regulation of Prostitution in Britain and the British Empire before the Contagious Diseases Acts
In this paper I examine the interplay of race and sexuality in 19th-century British colonial legislation concerning prostitution. I demonstrate that British systems of regulation of prostitution predated the introduction of the Contagious Diseases Act in 1864, and that rather than spreading from Britain to its colonies regulationist measures developed from the interplay of metropolitan-colonial relations. The example of Hong Kong serves to illust…
Imagination Under Pressure 1789-1832: Aesthetics, Politics, Utility
Book Review| January 01 2001 Imagination Under Pressure 1789-1832: Aesthetics, Politics, Utility John C. Whale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 240.$59.95. ISBN 0-521-77219-2 Peter Howell Peter Howell Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Eighteenth-Century Life (2001) 25 (1): 118–125. https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-25-1-118 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search…
Sex and the city of bachelors: Sporting guidebooks and urban knowledge in nineteenth-century Britain and America
Guidebooks to brothels and prostitutes flourished in mid-nineteenth century Britain and America, particularly in the great cities of London and New York. This paper treats such guides as a form of imaginative mapping, associated with a ‘sporting’ male culture of sexually predatory men and an ideal city of male sexual opportunity. Such guidebooks offered to their readers a particular form of urban knowledge, primarily through the construction of t…
Metropolitan History and the Disaster of London
A Place for the Animal Dead: Pets, Pet Cemeteries and Animal Ethics in Late Victorian Britain
The recent 'animal turn' in geography has contributed to a critical examination of the inseparable geographies of human and non-human animals, and has a clear ethical dimension. This paper is intended to explore these same ethical issues through a consideration of the historical geography of petkeeping as this relates to the death and commemoration of favourite household animals. The emergence of the pet cemetery, towards the end of the 19th cent…
Scott family (ii)
Scott, Sir George Gilbert, I
Venereal disease and the politics of prostitution in the Irish Free State
This article is intended primarily as a contribution to work on the regulation of sexuality in modern Ireland, but, more generally, it attempts to situate the Irish experience within a wider problematic concerning the relations of state and society in the regulation of prostitution. The regulation of sexuality in early twentieth-century Ireland has been a focus of concern for feminist historians in particular, and recent work has clearly demonstr…
John Pope Hennessy and the Translation of 'Slavery' between late nineteenth-century Barbados and Hong Kong
This paper uses the experiences of Sir John Pope Hennessy (1834‐91) as Governor of Barbados (1875‐76) and Hong Kong (1877‐82) to investigate the political geography of British imperial government in the later nineteenth century. Pope Hennessy's postings brought him into conflict with successive white settler elites, as he attempted to forward both colonial policy and his own humanitarian and political concerns. Two consecutive episodes demonstrat…
Race, space and the regulation of prostitution in Colonial Hong Kong
The geography of the regulation of sex work in colonial Hong Kong is examined as a contribution to the historiography of the colonial city. Particular attention is paid to racial and sexual segregation and their relation to Foucauldian concepts of discipline and regulated sexuality. The introduction and revision of Venereal Disease Ordinances, and the landscape of regulated prostitution that resulted, are read as part of a mid-nineteenth-century …
Sexuality, sovereignty and space: Law, government and the geography of prostitution in colonial Gibraltar
Godwin, Contractarianism, and the Political Dead End of Empiricism
Research Article| April 01 2004 Godwin, Contractarianism, and the Political Dead End of Empiricism Peter Howell Peter Howell Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Eighteenth-Century Life (2004) 28 (2): 61–86. https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-28-2-61 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Ic…
Mapping the Victorian Social Body
Philippa Levine - Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire
Left History features articles from a variety of theoretical approaches; these include feminist, marxist, and postmodernist deliberations on topics such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, culture, the state, labour, the environment, theory, and method
The politics of prostitution and the politics of public health in the Irish Free State: A response to Susannah Riordan
In an earlier article in Irish Historical Studies the present author argued that the beginnings of the Irish Free State’s campaign against venereal disease were caught up in a politics of prostitution that mobilised nationalist, republican and post-colonial sentiments, revolving around the struggle between military and civilian authority, and invoking the moral arbitration of the Catholic church. Susannah Riordan’s recent response has clarified t…
Concubines and power: Five hundred years in a northern Nigerian palace
Political science (32 works) · History (30 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Law (28 works) · History (24 works) · Law (21 works) · Politics (20 works) · Art (19 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (13 works)