Lucinda Cole

Early Modern and Eighteenth-Century British Literature; Environmental Humanities; Animal Studies; Literature and Science; Medcial Posthumanities

My research over the past ten years has been shaped by several new interdisciplinary fields: Animal Studies, Science Studies, Food Studies, and Environmental Humanities. My book Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1750 (University of Michican Press 2016) explores how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art and literature register and address environmental pressures during The Little Ice Age, when widespread food insecurity marked rodents, birds, and other small creatures as material and symbolic threats to fragile food supplies. In allianace with the One Health initiative The Fifth Plague: Cattle, Contagion, and Medical Posthumanites (Palgrave 2025) tries to bridge animal studies and the health humanites; it offers a new historical approach to literary plague studies, one taking seriously real and imagined relationships between human outbreaks, such as bubonic plague and cholera, and a series of even more mysterious animal diseases that killed in equally great numbers. As scientists and humanists face increasingly politicized information networks, I argue, we need to work together to  explore the past, present, and future of humanity’s decidedly interdependent and zoonotic existence.