Dan's first monograph, Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo: Stories from the Animal Archive is now available from University of Kansas Press.
Daniel Vandersommers
Ph.D., Department of History, The Ohio State University
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NEH Postdoctoral Fellow
Humanism Encaged: The American Zoo, 1887-1917
My project tells the story of how a zoo changed the world. Between 1870 and 1910, zoological parks appeared suddenly at the heart of every major American city and had tens of millions of visitors. Zoological parks at the turn of the century prepared the way for later environmental, conservation, and animal rights movements. They prepared the way for later cultural entanglements with the life sciences. Zoological parks functioned as theaters that first demonstrated simple lessons about animals that would capture the attention of the ever-expanding and ever-specializing body of scholars devoted to the study of life throughout the twentieth century. And zoological parks functioned as the first public tutorials in post-humanist thinking. Researched at the Smithsonian Institution Archives and ten other institutions, my projects presents a cultural history of popular zoology by showing how a zoo transformed the way that Americans thought about humans, animals, environments, and science.
Read more about Dan's work here.
Updates
Daniel Vandersommers
Daniel Vandersommers
Dan's edited volume, with Tracy McDonald, Zoo Studies: A New Humanities won the Choice "Outstanding Academic Title" award for the "Flora and Fauna" category in January 2021. He also published "The Sectionalism of the National Zoo: Animals, Language, Politics, Laughter" in Animal Histories of the Civil War Era, ed. Earl J. Hess (Louisiana State University Press, 2022).
Daniel Vandersommers
Daniel has accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the Indiana Academy, Ball State University. Dan also has an edited volume, Zoo Studies: A New Humanities, under contract with McGill-Queens University Press, as well as an article, "Sectionalism, Animal Symbols, and the Controversy of the National Zoo, 1887-1891," forthcoming in Environmental History. Daniel also delivered an address, “The Historical Ironies of Zoo Conservation, or How to Capture Bighorn Sheep in 1900," to the Centre for Evolutionary Ecology and Ethical Conservation at Laurentian University.
Daniel Vandersommers
Daniel recently published “Narrating Animal History from the Crags: A Turn-of-the-Century Tale about Mountain Sheep, Resistance, and a Nation,” Journal of American Studies, Vol. 51, No. 3 (August 2017): 751-777.