Cover reveal! Humans: A Monstrous History
The book is in production! - and some essays I published, plus some museum recommendations.
Hallo readers,
Humans: A Monstrous History is in production! I can hardly believe it since I have so much left to do in the next two months. This is the final window for adding treasures, subtracting waffles, unravelling gnarly messes, fact-checking, and generally improving all the things.
The book now has a cover! I’m thrilled with the design, and grateful to the wonderful designer who captured the sense of what I hope will be the readers’ verdict of the book: serious, compelling, gorgeous, and fun.
Here’s the book description, with many thanks to the press copywriter who magicked it with me:
Why do humans make monsters, and what do monsters tell us about humanity?
Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. Follow award-winning historian of science Dr. Surekha Davies as she reveals how people have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how they invented race, gender, and nations along the way. With rich, evocative storytelling that braids together ancient gods and generative AI, Frankenstein’s monster and ET, Humans: A Monstrous History shows how monster-making is about control: it defines who gets to count as normal.
In an age when corporations increasingly see people as obstacles to profits, this book traces the long, volatile history of monster-making to chart a better path for the future. The result is a profound, effervescent, empowering retelling of the history of the world for anyone who wants to reverse rising inequality and polarization. This is not a history of monsters, but a history through monsters.
Three years ago this week, I announced this book deal. I didn’t imagine the road ahead would be this hard or this rewarding. To be sure, having written a book before helped. I knew I’d survived getting a book out the door.
But the magic of the most incandescently wonderful trade-list books, of the authors whose books I never want to put down… that’s a library of examples that are at once thrilling and terrifying. It’s one thing to write a straight-up academic book, a monograph that’s deep, focused, and in some tiny way exhaustive, and another to create….a monster like the one incubating in my laptop.
But I’m excited to think about the fall, when Humans: A Monstrous History will be available for pre-order, and spring 2025 when it will be OUT IN THE WORLD! Stay tuned for pre-order news and giveaways, publication news, and book tour dates.
If you know anyone who might like the sound of the book, please consider telling them about it or forwarding this newsletter to them. Pre-orders make a big difference for trade-list authors. It encourages bookstores to stock it, online retailers to suggest it and promote it, and gives the press a sense of current interest in the book (and in its author… who hopes to keep writing books).
New writing
While you wait, three new reviews and essays I wrote are now out in the world. I reviewed colonial Latin American historian Marcy Norton’s spell-binding The Tame and the Wild: A History of People and Animals since 1492 for Nature.
I also reviewed anthropologist Gísli Pálsson’s haunting The Last of its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction for the Times Literary Supplement. I got to use the most memorable phrase ever to spurt from my brain: “death by potato.”
And I wrote an essay on Ole Worm’s seventeenth-century curiosity cabinet for an open-access art history site, SmartHistory, “the center for public art history.”
Takes and recs
On a recent conference and lecture trip to the US and Canada, I visited a few galleries and museums I heartily recommend. In Chicago, there’s a show of Picasso drawings at the Art Institute, which also has a few examples of seemingly every other sort of art and sculpture in its permanent galleries.
n Washington DC, the Afrofuturism show at the National Museum of African American History and Culture was immersive and sobering (on view until Aug. 18, 2024). The museum has plenty of online resources, too.
In Toronto, I was blown away by the Gardiner Museum, which has clay and ceramics artefacts from antiquity to the present, from ancient Nasca effigy jars to seventeenth-century Chinese porcelain.
Equally thrilling was the Stanford Lipsey Art Glass Collection at the Burchfield Penny Art Center in Buffalo (on display until May 25, 2024). A javelin’s-throw away is the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly known as the Albright-Knox Gallery), which has been renovated and expanded in recent years - another light-filled, calm, and gorgeous day out, now with a free indoor piazza area, which includes a great cafe.
Now it’s back to butt-in-seat and fingers on the keyboard.
You can also find me on:
BlueSky: default water cooler [ @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social ]
Instagram: lots of visuals; lots of art and history [ @surekhadavies ]
Mastodon: when I remember [ @SurekhaDavies@historians.social ]
The platform formerly known as Twitter: sharing the work of authors and news from libraries, museums, learned societies, and the world of books [ @surekhadavies ]
My website: surekhadavies.org
You can also find me on www.surekhadavies.org,
BlueSky (@drsurekhadavies.bsky.social),
and Instagram/Threads (@surekhadavies).