Course description
Our environment does not just belong to us, as humans. We share much of our lives with non-human animals: from the dogs or cats we live with, to the food we consume, and the pests we try to avoid, non-human life (and death) is always near. Literature enables us to imagine what life might look like from a non-human perspective. We urgently need this shift in perspective in order to find new solutions for contemporary challenges in the Anthropocene, from habitat to biodiversity loss.
This course explores environmental humanities through a focus on human-animal studies. To structure our thinking, we will read Ceridwen Dovey’s magnificent collection of short stories, Only the Animals. Each of the ten stories focuses on one animal, each killed in a human conflict of the past century or so. There is the camel killed in colonial Australia and the blue mussel killed in Pearl Harbour; the cat who died in the trenches in World War I and the bear who starved to death during the siege of Sarajevo; the dog who lost his life on the Eastern Front in World War II and the parrot killed during the 2006 bombing of Beirut; the ape who died in Germany during World War I and the Russian tortoise lost in space during the Cold War; the elephant killed in the civil war in Mozambique and the dolphin who chose to die during the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. Each story provides a historical and cultural case study. The course will move across disciplines and pair each short story with relevant research scholarship to provide a comprehensive introduction to new thinking in human-animal studies. Through animals we investigate larger questions of care, intimacy, technology, health, land use and food systems. We also investigate how social questions (e.g., gender, class, race, nationhood and ability/disability) are addressed with regard to other-than-human worlds.
The course will make animal studies directly relevant to the place in which we study: Venice. Together, we will visit the Valle Averto nature reserve (run by WWF Italia) near Campagna Lupia, on the edge of the Venetian lagoon. This beautiful lagoon “oasis” has been recognised by the State as a Nature Reserve and Wetland of International Importance. We will explore the nature reserve to observe some of its non-human inhabitants and their traces, from marine invertebrates and fish in the water, to wild ducks, wild geese, and my favourite (and much maligned) bird, the seagull. How will we think differently about animal studies and literature once we have encountered our fellow inhabitants of Venice? I look forward to discussing this with you!

Learning Outcomes of the course
By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Understand how the opposition nature/culture functions in literature.

• Comprehend how non-human perspectives can aid our thinking about literature, culture and history.

• Experiment with this new perspective through trying out a more creative and experimental approach to writing.

• Get familiar with critical concepts from human-animal studies, critical animal studies and environmental humanities.

• Apply critical concepts to a wide range of examples from literature.

• Demonstrate independence of thought by applying critical concepts to examples beyond the course content.

Syllabus:
Each week we will focus on one of the short stories from Ceridwen Dovey’s collection Only the Animals. You might like to purchase your own copy of the book in advance.

Week 1: “The Bones” – about a camel in colonial Australia
Week 2: “Pigeons, A Pony, The Tomcat and I” – about a cat in the trenches in World War I
Week 3: “Red Peter’s Little Lady” – about an ape in Germany during World War I
Week 4: Fieldtrip to Valle Averto nature reserve
Week 5: “Hundstage” – about a dog on the Eastern Front in World War II
Week 6: “Somewhere Along The Line The Pearl Would Be Handed To Me” – about the blue mussel killed in Pearl Harbour
Mid-term break
Week 7: “Plautus: A Memoir Of My Years On Earth And Last Days In Space” – about a Russian tortoise lost in space during the Cold War
Week 8: “I, The Elephant, Wrote This” – about an elephant in the civil war in Mozambique
Week 9: “Telling Fairytales” – about a starving bear during the siege of Sarajevo
Week 10: “A Letter To Sylvia Plath” – about a dolphin experiencing the American invasion of Iraq in 2003
Week 11: “Psittacophile” – about a parrot during the 2006 bombing of Beirut
Week 12 & exam week: students submit their final coursework in week 12 and present their work during exam week.

Teaching approach
The method of instruction will include seminar discussions using a flipped classroom approach, with students taking the lead to research and introduce a specific case study. Sessions will be supported by the assignment of seminal readings. Field trip to Valle Averto nature reserve.

Assessment:

• Class participation and short presentations throughout the course (25%)

• Beginning in week 1, students will keep a course journal. The journal may include short summaries of the reading, reflections, notes on animal encounters in Venice, and creative or autobiographical writing. A draft of this will form the basis of the midterm evaluation. (25%)

• Based on the course journal, students will produce a piece of creative writing as their final assessment alongside a commentary which outlines how their piece speaks to the course content and further reading. Students will present this coursework to the class during the exam week. (50%)

Bibliography/Recommended Readings:

Each story will be paired with a selection of further reading. The following is a suggested list of further reading. Please note that individual sessions will be adapted based on student input and suggestions and the following is a provisional list only.
Berger, John. Why Look at Animals? London: Penguin Books, 2009.
Blachette, Alex. Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.
Bourke, Joanna. What It Means to Be Human: Reflections from 1791 to the Present. London: Virago, 2011.
Castricano, Jodey, and Lauren Corman, eds. Animal Subjects 2.0. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016.
Goodbody, Axel. “Animal Studies: Kafka’s Animal Stories.” In Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, edited by Hubert Zapf, 249–272. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.
Gruen, Lori. “Navigating Difference (Again): Animal Ethics and Entangled Empathy.” In Strangers to Nature: Animal Lives and Human Ethics, edited by Gregory R. Smulewicz-Zucker, 213–34. New York: Lexington Books, 2012.
Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Hayward, Eva. “Fingeryeyes: Impressions of Cup Corals.” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 577–99.
O’Key, Dominic. Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature: Narrating the War Against Animals. London: Bloomsbury, 2022.
Saraiva, Tiago. Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.
Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Course duration: 40 hours of tuition
Credits equivalence: 6 ECTS

 Last updated: June 25, 2026