De Gruyter Conversations

What does it mean to be human? How can other forms of being, such as non-human animals or algorithms, help us understand what makes humanity unique? Such questions are central to posthumanist research, which has been proliferating in recent years across the humanities and social sciences.

Yet they are anything but new: as Erika Quinn and Holly Yanacek show in their recent book “Animals, Machines, and AI“, philosophy, literature, and the visual arts have been fascinated by non-human forms of life and interrogated received understandings of the human for centuries.

Myrto Aspioti sat down for a virtual chat with the volume editors on the challenges of writing a book about our relationship to machines and animals just as Covid-19 hit, forcing us all behind screens and in the sole company of our beloved pets.

Link to the book: doi.org/10.1515/9783110753677

The editors:

Dr. Erika Quinn is Professor of History at Eureka College. Her research interests lie in Central European cultural history, focusing on subjectivity and the history of emotions. Her book, Franz Liszt: A Story of Central European Subjectivity, was published by Brill in 2014. She has also published articles on twentieth-century war widowhood and gender in the Journal of First World War Studies, the Women in German Yearbook, and elsewhere.

Dr. Holly Yanacek is Assistant Professor of German at James Madison University. Her research focuses on emotion, narration, gender, ethics, and the non-human in 19th- to 21st-century Germanophone literature and culture. Her previous research has been supported by grants from Fulbright, the German Historical Institute, and the DAAD, and she has recently published articles in German Life and Letters, Monatshefte, and Novel: A Forum on Fiction. Yanacek co-edited (with Colin MacCabe) the collaborative book Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary (Oxford University Press, 2018).

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