Feb
19
5:30pm
Book Launch: Monsters
By Society for Renaissance Studies
Join Surekha Davies to celebrate the launch of Humans: A Monstrous History with friends, colleagues and well-wishers.
Speakers
Leah Redmond Chang
Surekha Davies
Ricardo Padrón
Caroline Dodds Pennock
Tamara J. Walker
This is a book about monster-making: the stories societies tell about who they think isn’t normal or typical—the process of defining people as something outside normal categories, as something monstrous.
Surekha Davies, from the Introduction
HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY
By Surekha Davies
A powerful and provocative history of how humans have created monsters out of one another—and what these monsters tell us about humanity's present and future.
From ancient gods to generative AI, from Dracula to E.T., and from Hannibal Lecter to the Menendez brothers, monsters saturate our culture: on the big screen, in the pages of our books, in the news, and in our social media feeds. But what is it that defines a monster? What, exactly, makes something or someone so monstrous?
In Humans: a Monstrous History (UC Press; February 2025), award-winning historian Dr. Surekha Davies seeks to answer these questions, taking readers on a fascinating journey through our extensive history of monster-making. Exploring humankind’s long history with monsters—how we have created, classified, and identified them throughout the ages—she explains how monsters are, at their core, marked by the idea of otherness. Who and what we see as a threat becomes subhuman; when we distinguish “self” from “the rest” we create a monster lurking somewhere outside of societal norms. And when we relate our fellow humans to everything from apes to witches to zombies, we place them outside the realm of the normal—a fundamental process in inventing various racial, gender, and ethnic stereotypes.
Analyzing how people have persistently defined humankind through bodies, beliefs, and behaviours, Humans reveals:
- How the designation of “monster” transforms abstract fears into physical forms
- How monster-making is about control, defining who and what counts as “normal”
- How monstrous stereotypes are used to ostracise and dehumanise
- Why confronting our volatile history with monsters allows us to better understand our present and offers a clear path to a better future
Blending science, history, and pop culture, in Humans, Davies tells the strange and compelling story of how our multi-millennial relationship with monsters has shaped the origins of the modern world. A profound and powerful retelling of the history of humanity, Humans offers a lens through which to view hidden assumptions about nature and society at large.
About the Author
Dr. Surekha Davies is a British author, speaker, and historian of science, art, and ideas. Her first book, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters, won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history from the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Roland H. Bainton Prize in History and Theology. She has published essays and book reviews about the histories of biology, anthropology, and monsters in the Times Literary Supplement, Nature, Science, and Aeon.
Select Praise for Surekha Davies
“Surekha Davies turns the tables and looks at humankind through the burning eyes of the monsters it has created in its seemingly limitless effort to isolate otherness. A triumph of scholarship that is as erudite as it is entertaining.” — Lindsey Fitzharris, New York Times bestselling author of The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I
“To consider the monster is to consider what it means to be human, because it forces us to examine how we have prescribed those limits, whether in terms of race, sexuality, appearance, or capacities. So Davies's book could not be more timely or urgent. That it is constantly insightful, erudite, and entertaining makes it irresistible; I can imagine no more congenial way of arguing that, in the end, the monsters are us.” — Philip Ball, author of The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens
“In a fascinating upending of the usual analysis of monsters, Davies focuses on the humans who perpetrate ‘monstrification,’ from scientists and sports doctors to pop stars and spiritual leaders. The monster here emerges less as a figure for identity than a metaphor for a cultural process, constantly under revision, that allows one group of humans to disavow the humanity of another. Thoughtful, wide-ranging, and fun.” — Annalee Newitz, bestselling author of The Terraformers and Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age
“A marvel of fast-paced storytelling and rigorous historical analysis. Davies takes readers on a journey across space and time, carefully reconstructing centuries-old processes of monster-making with wit and aplomb. In the process, we learn that monster-makers have policed the boundaries of humanity out of ignorance, fear, and hate, producing forms of legal and social exclusion that we all live with today. But there is also a sense of hope suffused throughout the pages of this book: hope that with knowledge, bravery, and love, we can recognise the humanity in all of us and chart more inclusive, less frightful futures.” — Tamara J. Walker, author of Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad
Humans: A Monstrous History
By Surekha Davies
University of California Press | February 4, 2025 | ISBN: 9780520388093 / ISBN: 9780520388116| $29.95 / £25.00| Hardcover / eBook | 336 Pages
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