Laura Brown, Visiting Scholar Program – November 8, 2018

What do companion animals and money have to do with each other? Why were lapdogs and coins special objects in eighteenth-century narratives? What do dogs and coins tell us about love, about human affect, and even about what counts as human? Do coins ‘count’ as human? Do pet dogs?

Laura Brown is the John Wendell Anderson Professor of English, Cornell University, and author of Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Her work examines the histories of modernity, from the creation of the stock market to urban sanitation from encounters with the non-human to the creation of racial differences.