A Queer Bestiary Non/Humans in Contemporary US Literature

This talk outlines Dr Lloyd's forthcoming book, A Queer Bestiary: Non/Humans in Contemporary US Literature.

Taking the Medieval bestiary as its starting point, the talk outlines how that form might be ‘queered' by exploring contemporary texts by US authors that put pressure on questions of species and liveability in relation to (among other things) race, gender, and sexuality. With reference to taxidermy in particular, the talk argues for seeing the queer intimacies of non/human worlds.

Dr Christopher Lloyd (he or him) is an Associate Professor of Learning and Teaching at the University of Hertfordshire. His books include the recent co-edited volume The Affects of Pedagogy in Literary Studies (2023, with Hilary Emmett) and two monographs, Corporeal Legacies in the US South: Memory and Embodiment in Contemporary Culture (2018) and Rooting Memory, Rooting Place: Regionalism in the Twenty-First-Century American South (2015). He is the co-editor of the European Journal of American Culture and the Vice-Chair of BAAS.