In Conversation with Dr. Surekha Davies, author of "Humans: A Monstrous History" (UC Press, 2025)

Join us for a conversation with Dr. Surekha Davies, author of Humans: A Monstrous History (UC Press, 2025). From the UC Press website: "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." Dr. Davies is a historian, speaker, and monster consultant. In addition to Humans, she is the author of Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters, which won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history from the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Roland H. Bainton Prize in History and Theology. A former British Library Map Library curator and history professor, she has held fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library, the Library of Congress, and elsewhere. She has a BA and an M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from the University of London.

Her essays include: op-eds in the LA Times, most recently last week; an essay in Smithsonian Magazine about an early 16th-century Portuguese painting that featured monsters with African, Indigenous Caribbean, and intersex features; “Can the Archive Make a Monster of a Historian?”, a meditation in Contingent Magazine on the story behind my two books; and “Monstrification” in Aeon, showing how for centuries people have defined individuals and groups as monsters in order to push them out of the category of human. She writes a free newsletter, Notes from a Science Historian.