Andrew Flack
Biographic Data
| ID | 998579 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrew Flack |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrew |
| FAMILY NAME | Flack |
| SIGNATURE | FLACK A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bristol |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9099-2802 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 11 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Misfits, Power, and History
In this article, we construct a critical history of "ability" by focusing on the specific case study of dark-dwelling animals and the ways in which they have been understood over the course of modernity. Such creatures were frequently the subjects of assumptions and judgments about what they could and could not do. Dark places have historically been imagined as extreme environments and as home to equally strange beings. We argue that discourse re…
Animals and Epidemics
Senior Lecturer in Modern and Environmental History, School of Humanities, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK E-mail: [email protected]
Echo Worlds and Mole-Thinking
In this article we track the relationship between transforming ways of engaging with animal Otherness in the context of Western scientific writing from the mid-eighteenth through to the early twenty-first century. Specifically, we engage with studies of dark-adapted sensoria. There are few species which seem to have presented such a challenge to the Western, post-enlightenment capacity to imagine Otherness, than those which dwell in darkness. Ind…
Dark Trails
Human engagements with dark-dwelling beings and the worlds in which they live have historically been shaped not only by relative levels of illumination but also by the sensorial chasm separating human experiences from that of countless animal others. The implications of this situation have largely escaped environmental and animal historians, who have mainly focused on the day as a space and time in which to situate their interrogations of intersp…
Eseh Notepad
Dark Degenerations
Focusing on Kentucky's immense and world-famous Mammoth Cave, this essay considers contexts from across the nineteenth century in which subterranean darkness was envisaged as a driving force in the transformation of living things. In fact, the cave was the stage for several allied discourses of "dark degeneracy" that conjured images of both generative and destructive mutability, from the generation of animals without eyes to the apparent disinteg…
Frogs and Feeling Communities
This article offers an overview of some approaches from the history of emotions that environmental historians could employ in order to sharpen engagement with emotion, and applies some of these approaches to a long history of human-frog interactions, by way of example. We propose that emotions have played a key role in the constitution of human communities, as well as enabling or inhibiting particular kinds of human thoughts and actions in relati…
Ask of the Beasts and They Shall Teach Thee”
People have been visiting zoos to look at non-human animals for almost two centuries. They observe a real animal, but what they see in their mind’s eye could be informed by how the animal is represented in the zoo’s guidebooks. Representations are rooted in two ways of looking: one positions the animal as an object of scientific study representative of his or her species, the other turns him or her into an individual animal with a life framed in …
Continental Creatures
In Norse mythology Fenrir, a wolf God born of the God of fire, possessed so much power that he horrified the other gods. Restrained by a chain forged from elements of the earth – such as the breath of fish and the roots of mountains – his power was held in check so that it could not be unleashed across the realms of gods and men. The chains of his captivity appeared to be fragile but were in fact supernaturally robust, though his eventual catastr…
At Home and Astray
Journal Article Paws for Thought: Dogs and their People in the Victorian Metropolis Get access At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain, by PhilipHowell, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015, x + 252 pp., illustrated, £35.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-8139-3686-4 Andrew J. P. Flack Andrew J. P. Flack 1University of Bristol Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Victorian Cul…
In Sight, Insane
In 1979 Bristol Zoo acquired a male polar bear named Misha. Although he was one in a long line of popular attractions, he behaved in ways that the public and, to a lesser degree, the zoological society increasingly judged to be disturbing. He endlessly paced back and forth in his enclosure, swaying his head repetitively from side to side. Following media attention from animal rights organisations and the media between 1985 and the early 1990s, Mi…
Lions loose on a gentleman's lawn
Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(2015). Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Empathy, Education, Entertainment. By Helen Cowie. Cultural and Social History: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 140-142
The Illustrious Stranger
1850 saw the arrival of an unusual animal in Victorian London. This creature, a river hippopotamus, captured in the vicinity of the Isle of Obaysch on the upper White Nile, was alleged to have been the first of its kind to be displayed anywhere in Europe since the time of the Roman Empire and its animal games. A surge of popular enthusiasm engulfed it in a phenomenon that came to be known as “Hippomania.” This essay examines representations of Ob…
Lions loose on a gentleman's lawn
Dark Trails
Human engagements with dark-dwelling beings and the worlds in which they live have historically been shaped not only by relative levels of illumination but also by the sensorial chasm separating human experiences from that of countless animal others. The implications of this situation have largely escaped environmental and animal historians, who have mainly focused on the day as a space and time in which to situate their interrogations of intersp…
Dark Degenerations
Focusing on Kentucky's immense and world-famous Mammoth Cave, this essay considers contexts from across the nineteenth century in which subterranean darkness was envisaged as a driving force in the transformation of living things. In fact, the cave was the stage for several allied discourses of "dark degeneracy" that conjured images of both generative and destructive mutability, from the generation of animals without eyes to the apparent disinteg…
Frogs and Feeling Communities
This article offers an overview of some approaches from the history of emotions that environmental historians could employ in order to sharpen engagement with emotion, and applies some of these approaches to a long history of human-frog interactions, by way of example. We propose that emotions have played a key role in the constitution of human communities, as well as enabling or inhibiting particular kinds of human thoughts and actions in relati…
Ask of the Beasts and They Shall Teach Thee”
People have been visiting zoos to look at non-human animals for almost two centuries. They observe a real animal, but what they see in their mind’s eye could be informed by how the animal is represented in the zoo’s guidebooks. Representations are rooted in two ways of looking: one positions the animal as an object of scientific study representative of his or her species, the other turns him or her into an individual animal with a life framed in …
At Home and Astray
Journal Article Paws for Thought: Dogs and their People in the Victorian Metropolis Get access At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain, by PhilipHowell, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015, x + 252 pp., illustrated, £35.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-8139-3686-4 Andrew J. P. Flack Andrew J. P. Flack 1University of Bristol Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Victorian Cul…
The Illustrious Stranger
1850 saw the arrival of an unusual animal in Victorian London. This creature, a river hippopotamus, captured in the vicinity of the Isle of Obaysch on the upper White Nile, was alleged to have been the first of its kind to be displayed anywhere in Europe since the time of the Roman Empire and its animal games. A surge of popular enthusiasm engulfed it in a phenomenon that came to be known as “Hippomania.” This essay examines representations of Ob…
Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(2015). Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Empathy, Education, Entertainment. By Helen Cowie. Cultural and Social History: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 140-142
At Home and Astray
Journal Article Paws for Thought: Dogs and their People in the Victorian Metropolis Get access At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain, by PhilipHowell, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015, x + 252 pp., illustrated, £35.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-8139-3686-4 Andrew J. P. Flack Andrew J. P. Flack 1University of Bristol Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Victorian Cul…
In Sight, Insane
In 1979 Bristol Zoo acquired a male polar bear named Misha. Although he was one in a long line of popular attractions, he behaved in ways that the public and, to a lesser degree, the zoological society increasingly judged to be disturbing. He endlessly paced back and forth in his enclosure, swaying his head repetitively from side to side. Following media attention from animal rights organisations and the media between 1985 and the early 1990s, Mi…
Lions loose on a gentleman's lawn
Ask of the Beasts and They Shall Teach Thee”
People have been visiting zoos to look at non-human animals for almost two centuries. They observe a real animal, but what they see in their mind’s eye could be informed by how the animal is represented in the zoo’s guidebooks. Representations are rooted in two ways of looking: one positions the animal as an object of scientific study representative of his or her species, the other turns him or her into an individual animal with a life framed in …
Continental Creatures
In Norse mythology Fenrir, a wolf God born of the God of fire, possessed so much power that he horrified the other gods. Restrained by a chain forged from elements of the earth – such as the breath of fish and the roots of mountains – his power was held in check so that it could not be unleashed across the realms of gods and men. The chains of his captivity appeared to be fragile but were in fact supernaturally robust, though his eventual catastr…
Frogs and Feeling Communities
This article offers an overview of some approaches from the history of emotions that environmental historians could employ in order to sharpen engagement with emotion, and applies some of these approaches to a long history of human-frog interactions, by way of example. We propose that emotions have played a key role in the constitution of human communities, as well as enabling or inhibiting particular kinds of human thoughts and actions in relati…
Dark Trails
Human engagements with dark-dwelling beings and the worlds in which they live have historically been shaped not only by relative levels of illumination but also by the sensorial chasm separating human experiences from that of countless animal others. The implications of this situation have largely escaped environmental and animal historians, who have mainly focused on the day as a space and time in which to situate their interrogations of intersp…
Eseh Notepad
Dark Degenerations
Focusing on Kentucky's immense and world-famous Mammoth Cave, this essay considers contexts from across the nineteenth century in which subterranean darkness was envisaged as a driving force in the transformation of living things. In fact, the cave was the stage for several allied discourses of "dark degeneracy" that conjured images of both generative and destructive mutability, from the generation of animals without eyes to the apparent disinteg…
Animals and Epidemics
Senior Lecturer in Modern and Environmental History, School of Humanities, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK E-mail: [email protected]
Echo Worlds and Mole-Thinking
In this article we track the relationship between transforming ways of engaging with animal Otherness in the context of Western scientific writing from the mid-eighteenth through to the early twenty-first century. Specifically, we engage with studies of dark-adapted sensoria. There are few species which seem to have presented such a challenge to the Western, post-enlightenment capacity to imagine Otherness, than those which dwell in darkness. Ind…
Misfits, Power, and History
In this article, we construct a critical history of "ability" by focusing on the specific case study of dark-dwelling animals and the ways in which they have been understood over the course of modernity. Such creatures were frequently the subjects of assumptions and judgments about what they could and could not do. Dark places have historically been imagined as extreme environments and as home to equally strange beings. We argue that discourse re…
Geographies of human-animal interactions (12 works) · History (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Art (9 works) · History (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Biology (6 works) · Ecology (6 works)