(U.S. - Iowa) Articulating the Animal

[Mary Finelli]

UI RESEARCHERS TO EXPLORE 'ARTICULATING THE ANIMAL' IN OBERMANN FALL
SEMESTER
University of Iowa News Release, Feb. 28, 2005


As the Great Ape Project opens in Des Moines and the University of Iowa
recovers from the attack on animal research facilities in Spence
Laboratories, scholars at the UI Obermann Center for Advanced Studies are
preparing to study the many roles animals play in our culture.

Six UI researchers have been selected to participate in the Obermann
Center's fall 2005 Interdisciplinary Research Semester, "Articulating the
Animal." The semester-long program, established in 2002, brings together
scholars working on similar topics in diverse disciplines. In weekly
discussions of participants' developing projects, members are challenged to
break through conventions of their home disciplines in order to produce new,
synthetic knowledge, said Jay Semel, Obermann Center director.

Jane Desmond and Teresa Mangum, both associate professors in the UI College
of Liberal Arts and Sciences, will direct the Articulating the Animal
Research Semester. Their goal is to bring together scientists who study
animals, artists who represent animals, and humanities and social science
scholars who examine representations of animals or analyze human and animal
interaction.

Desmond, associate professor of American Studies and associate dean of
International Programs, will complete "Extending our Senses: Robotics and
Rover," a chapter of her book "Displaying Death/Animating Life: Fictions of
Liveness from Taxidermy to Animatronics." The chapter explores the use of
animals as ways of extending human bodily capabilities (for example search
and rescue, seeing eye and hearing dogs) and the relationship between the
conceptualization of sensory
perception and the development of robotic prostheses.

Mangum, associate professor of English and International Programs, is
writing a book on the emotional connections between animals and humans in
the 19th-century that inspired both novels like "Black Beauty" and
organizations like the Society for the Protection of Animals. She will write
an article, "The Melancholy Mammal: Victorian Theories of Animal Emotions."

Joining Desmond and Mangum will be Kim Marra, associate professor of theatre
arts and American studies, Mary Trachsel, associate professor of rhetoric
and Ed Wasserman, professor of psychology, all in the College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences; and Pamela Trimpe, a curator at the UI Museum of Art.

Marra plans a study of women and horses on the American stage. Focused on
the nation's cultural capital, New York City, during the Golden Age of U.S.
theatre (before its eclipse by talking cinema) and of the horse (before its
eclipse by the automobile), the study examines female and equine performance
in three highly influential arenas that shared audiences -- Broadway
theatre, the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden and the Belmont
Park Racetrack.

Trachsel will explore the ethical dimensions of apes and language
instruction. Her project examines human anxieties, hopes and desires in
response to the suggestion that humans are not alone in "personhood," that
is, having intellectual powers superior to other animals.

Trimpe is planning an exhibition of 18th- and 19th-century paintings of
animals. The exhibition, "Bovine Portraits: Victorian Big Beasts and the
Origins of Biogenetics," will be the first survey of the genre of large
animal portrait painting that flourished in Britain between the 1760s
and the early-1900s. It will offer a look back on the British hope of the
future of selective breeding and forward to the logical extension of genetic
engineering to feed an expanding world population.

Wasserman will continue his work on animal intelligence, investigating the
intelligence of great apes at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa. He will focus on
the apes' ability to learn abstract same-different concepts by giving them
tasks in which they must respond to general relations between or among
stimuli, rather than specific attributes of each stimulus. Because some of
the apes are highly skilled in a symbolic communication system and others
are not, he will be able to determine whether their same-different behavior
is affected by language.

Earlier Research Semester topics were "Sounding the Voice" (Spring 2004) and
"Sex, Economics, Politics: Sexuality as a Social Phenomenon" (Fall 2002.)

Participants in the Interdisciplinary Research Seminar receive a course
reduction, $1,500 apiece for discretionary research expenses, and funding
for a speaker series or symposium. They are selected through a competitive
review and with the approval of their department chairs and Deans. Funding
for the Interdisciplinary Research Semester is provided by the Office of the
Vice President for Research, the Office of the Provost, and the C. Esco and
Avalon L. Obermann Fund.

Story source: University of Iowa News Services, 300 Plaza Centre One, Suite
371, Iowa City, Iowa 52242-2500.

Media contact: Mary Geraghty Kenyon, 319-384-0011,
mary-...@uiowa.edu.


Thomas K. Dean
Special Assistant to the President
Office of the President
101 Jessup Hall
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242

(319)335-1995 (direct)
(319)335-3549 (main office)
(319)335-0807 (FAX)

thomas...@uiowa.edu