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June 21st, 2019
In an interview with Vicki Hutton, the author of A Reason to Live: HIV and Animal Companions, we discuss the new book and relevant subjects, including the public perception of HIV/AIDS and the universality of the human-animal bond. A Reason to Live is the newest book in the popular New Directions in the Human-Animal Bond book series, edited by Dr. Alan M. Beck and Dr. Marguerite O’Haire.
Q: Could you briefly explain your book, for those who are not familiar?
Vicki Hutton: A Reason to Live provides a testament to the power of the human-animal relationship for eleven men living with HIV in Australia. In the 1980s HIV changed the lives of thousands of people in a way that could never have been predicted. For many people living with HIV, their animal companions followed them into this new and unexpected life and by doing so, provided some semblance of normality in a world turned upside down.
For others with HIV, their animal companions joined them further down the track, and provided the consistent and unconditional support that was not always forthcoming from other humans and the medical world. For this reason, animal companions are part of the narrative history of HIV, and part of the meaning-making around an epidemic that changed the world.
This collection of narratives spans the entirety of the HIV epidemic in Australia, from public awareness and discrimination in the 1980s and 1990s, to survival and hope in the twenty-first century. Each narrative is explored within the context of the latest human-animal research and theory in order to understand the unique bond between human and animal during an ‘epidemic of stigma’. A consistent theme is that these animals provided ‘a reason to live’: both for the long-term survivors and their past animal companions who offered unconditional love and support during this tumultuous period; and the current generation of HIV-positive narrators whose animal companions form part of the ‘wellness narrative’ of living and ageing with HIV.
Q: What compelled you to research and write about these stories?
Hutton: I could say that this was a logical outcome of my main areas of research interest: the human-animal relationship and stigmatized medical conditions, but it was far more than that. From the moment I visited a local HIV/AIDS support organization to check out the feasibility of conducting some research into stigma and the human-animal relationship, there was no going back. I was amazed by the willingness of so many people who jumped at the opportunity to describe the wonder and gratitude they felt towards their animal companions. The horrors of living with HIV, including the reactions of other humans, became almost incidental to the latest antics of their beloved animals. That first visit reshaped my research project, and I will always be grateful to the individuals who shared their time and their stories so openly and modestly. A Reason to Live is more than a cultural memory: it is a thank you to those individuals and a celebration of the human-animal relationship.
Q: What do you think are some of the most prevalent public misunderstandings surrounding HIV/AIDS?
Hutton: The first thing to remember is that there is not one HIV epidemic. It is experienced in different ways within and between countries, and according to race, gender, sexuality, age, income and decade. For example, a young woman living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa faces different challenges and public misconceptions to an older gay man living in US. Over the decades it has also attracted social meanings beyond the medical meanings, making any public misconceptions surrounding HIV and AIDS dependent on a range of factors.
With this in mind, I’ve noticed a common misconception that seems to straddle many of these groups is the tendency to assign ‘blame’ and ‘innocence’ to those with HIV. In the early years, the concept of blame and innocence saw those who contracted the virus as a result of lifestyle choices – such as unprotected sex or intravenous drug use – deemed less worthy of care and support than those who contracted it through circumstances that were perceived as out of their control – such as blood transfusions or childbirth. Fast forward several decades and blame may still emerge where a person is perceived as contracting HIV because they took avoidable lifestyle risks or failed to adequately protect themselves by adopting all the modern (medical) ways of avoiding HIV.
According to the men I spoke to, there can also be misconceptions around what it means to live and age with this stigmatized and incurable condition. They described how the medications can keep them physically healthy, but there are still challenges such as forming and maintaining relationships, and fears for the future. They described how the public perception in developed nations at least had moved towards HIV being a chronic but manageable condition – as long as a person maintains their medication regime. This perception that HIV and AIDS ares ‘over’ sometimes left them feeling ungrateful, isolated and unable to articulate the ongoing niggling anxieties that HIV can evoke (especially around ageing and cognitive decline).
And finally, I’d like to think that early public misconceptions about the ease of transmission of HIV have abated but according to some of the people I spoke to, this may not always be the case. They described how rules of physical contact were sometimes overtly or covertly reconstructed, leaving them feeling rejected and isolated. They acknowledged that negative experiences had definitely reduced over the years, but this sometimes made it all the more distressing when something unexpected happened. It seems that globally HIV still struggles to divest its misunderstood and demonized reputation.
Q: How do you feel these misunderstandings could be remedied?
Hutton: I’m not sure I’m in a position to make a meaningful response to this, given the diversity of the lived experience of HIV. I think if I make suggestions as someone who isn’t living with HIV, my response or suggestions could be perceived as trite and generic.
However, based on the stories I heard, perhaps learning from the actions of our non-judgmental animal companions could be a good starting place.
Q: Many are aware of the unconditional love that animals provide, but don’t quite grasp how much these animals can help. What are some of the most profound ways you feel these animals helped their humans or carers?
Hutton: Where do I start? These animal companions were lifelines for some of the men, providing a tangible anchor to the good parts of life that had been eroded following their diagnosis with HIV. Animals are without guile, and they can effortlessly cushion the fundamental human fears of separation and abandonment. They ask for nothing more than love and security, something all the men were delighted to give. In return, their affection remained predictable, and unaffected by their human’s circumstances or appearances.
An animal’s love can’t be faked – a tail wag, a purr, a nibble or affectionate head butt comes straight from the heart. If an animal is looking at you with love and anticipation, it’s easy to believe you are needed and still the same person you always had been. One man described being incontinent and bed-ridden, and how his animal companion lay on the bed and loved him regardless.
If an animal is expecting to be loved and fed, what better incentive to remain alive? One man acknowledged that with a non-existent social network following his diagnosis, his death by suicide would inevitably doom his young cat to starvation before anyone thought to check his apartment. The cat was his reason to live during those dark times.
And if you’re constantly having to care for, clean up after, and exercise an animal, what better way to keep fit? Many of the men described having to drag themselves out of bed in the morning to walk their dog, or feed the chickens, or just let the dog or cat outside to urinate. All acknowledged they probably would have just stayed in bed without this incentive – and felt so much worse for it.
Q: How do you feel traveling around Australia interviewing these eleven men most impacted you?
Hutton: This whole experience impacted me in a way that I had not expected. On many occasions I desperately missed the emotional support that my own animal friends would normally offer, especially after some of the more emotion-laden interviews. I longed to go home and cuddle my own animal friends, but this was impossible when thousands of miles away in a different state. I soon learned that no matter where I was, the emotion behind the stories was similar, and it was only the differences in weather and venues that differed – and the distance from my own animal support network.
But there were many fun times too. Whether I was in Sydney, Melbourne or any other state, I’d have to carry the same treats and goodies in my bag for those animal companions who came along to supervise the interviews. Many of the animals, especially the dogs, soon worked out where the treats were stored, and my travel bag became increasingly scratched and nibbled.
Some of these men are no longer alive. Where they lived interstate, sometimes I learned of their death accidentally or well after the event. I’m grateful I had the opportunity to hear their story, and it’s a timely reminder that even with twenty-first century medications, living and ageing with HIV still carries uncertainty and risk.
Q: Where there any interesting stories that came from the interviews that did not make it into the book?
Hutton: Some of the most interesting stories came out of our more informal discussions once the recording equipment was off. We shared stories of cat vomit and hairballs, anal glands and chewing habits, urination, defecation, muddy paw prints, scratched furniture and inequitable sharing of bed space – all the day-to-day minutiae that is so riveting for anyone who shares their living space with animal companions.
There were also some personal stories not related to the animal companions that were too harrowing to include in this book. Sometimes I was entrusted with information that a person had never shared before, and it would have been a violation of that trust to include these events. Each man’s story could have been a book in itself as they described their lived experience of HIV in a sometimes harsh and judgmental world. I’ve tried to do justice to those stories through the animals, while acknowledging that this was only one part of navigating life with HIV.
Receive 30% off you own copy of A Reason to Live by entering the promo code PURDUE30 at checkout on our website.
Filed under: UncategorizedMay 28th, 2019
Philip Roth Studies is a peer-reviewed semiannual journal published by Purdue University Press in cooperation with the Philip Roth Society. The journal publishes writing pertaining entirely or in part to Philip Roth, his fiction, and his literary and cultural significance.
Philip Roth Studies Volume 15, Issue 1, out this month, will be the final issue for executive co-editors Debra Shostak and David Brauner. We spoke to them about their experience, Philip Roth’s passing, and the future of the journal.
Q: PRS 15.1 is special for a few reasons; could you explain its significance?
Debra Shostak and David Brauner: The spring 2019 issue of Philip Roth Studies, volume 15, is professionally and personally momentous for us as editors, and we hope it will be as meaningful to our readers as it is to us. PRS 15.1 is valedictory, not only because it is the last issue we will have overseen before turning the Executive Co-editorship of the journal over to the capable hands of Aimee Pozorski and Maren Scheurer, but also, and even more movingly for us, because we are honoring the late Philip Roth, who died in May of 2018, with a special memorial issue.
To remember Roth as a writer who has brought so many of us together within the pages of PRS over nearly fifteen years, we invited reflective essays from eighteen scholars who have contributed significantly to the study of his work, mostly in monographs devoted significantly or wholly to Roth. We are also thrilled to publish what we think may be the last scholarly interview Roth granted, to Elèna Mortara, who has edited the Italian editions of his work for the prestigious literary series Meridiani Mondadori. Our line-up of contributors is stellar—in alphabetical order, Victoria Aarons, Ann Basu, Alan Cooper, David Gooblar, Jay Halio, Patrick Hayes, Brett Ashley Kaplan, Michael Kimmage, Pia Masiero, Maggie McKinley, Catherine Morley, Ira Nadel, Patrick O’Donnell, Timothy Parrish, Aimee Pozorski, and Matthew Shipe—and their offerings are brilliant, heartfelt, at times humorous (and we two have exploited our executive editor privilege to include our own reflections as well). The essays run from memories of meeting Roth and of attending his funeral, to musings on the profound, often disorienting, effects of his fiction on us as readers and critics. Contributors meditate on Roth’s attachment to Newark, New Jersey, on the sexual politics of his fiction, on his allusions to children, on his deep and troubled connection to the American history to which he faithfully, sometimes mercilessly, bore witness, on how he speaks to the present moment, on his devotion to literary pleasures, and on his fictive conversations with his literary forebears. Others revisit The Human Stain, Sabbath’s Theater, and American Pastoral. Without exception, the essays demonstrate Roth’s vital, unabated presence among us all—in his language, his stories, his inexhaustible formal invention, his integrity, his daring—even though he is no longer living among us to delight us yet again.
We, David and Deb, are bidding farewell to the many pleasures of editing Philip Roth Studies, but we will never bid farewell to the boundless, bottomless Philip Roth.
Q: What got you interested in studying Philip Roth? Was there a particular work that you feel most inspired your interest?
David: I first encountered Roth’s work when, as a teenager, I picked up a copy of Portnoy’s Complaint at random from my parents’ bookshelves, knowing nothing about it. In spite of the temporal and geographical gap between my own circumstances—growing up in a London suburb in the 1970s and 80s—and those of the protagonist—growing up in New Jersey in the 1940s and 50s—I felt an immediate thrill of recognition. It articulated brilliantly—and hilariously—what I later called a “transnational Jewish sensibility,” the profound ambivalence of Jews in the post-war period towards both their own Jewishness and the larger culture. There was then a hiatus of a number of years before, as a graduate student, I read The Counterlife. That was the book that got me hooked—I went on to read, systematically, everything that Roth had written and I began to write about his work. What struck me most powerfully about The Counterlife was the way it combined ingenious metafiction with compelling domestic drama and big political, historical, and existential questions. Later, Sabbath’s Theater was the novel that cemented my conviction of Roth’s pre-eminence among contemporary novelists: I remember vividly as I read it the first time thinking “this is one of the greatest novels I’ve ever read” and each successive re-reading has only reinforced my belief that this is Roth’s masterpiece.
Deb: My encounter—and fascination—with Roth’s work runs parallel to David’s in several ways. I remember seeing the vivid yellow cover of Portnoy’s Complaint on my parents’ bookshelves during my early adulthood, but I never picked it up. Instead, after hearing a casual recommendation in the late 1980s, I read The Counterlife. I was at once enthralled—by Roth’s dizzying formal experiment, his antic humor, his unique voice, and the magical touch by which he could make that most reflexive of novels seem like familiar realism in its treatment of family, history, and selfhood. I never anticipated how much that book would reshape my professional life. I felt driven to try to write about it, and then, reading through all of Roth’s work and eagerly awaiting each new volume, I never looked back. I was captivated by the hard questions he asked about American history, politics, and manhood, and by the many pleasures of his sentences. Like David, I judge Sabbath’s Theater to be Roth’s masterpiece, but for me, Operation Shylock runs a close second. If I had to guess which novels will most centrally keep Roth’s work alive for readers in the coming years, though, I’d probably point to his powerful treatment of twentieth-century America, “real” and all-too-real: in the American Trilogy and The Plot Against America.
Q: How do you think Roth’s death will affect the study of his work?
Deb and David: In the short term, it will stimulate scholarship, as critics reassess his work and his legacy in the round. In the longer term, there is a danger that interest in his work may wane—we have seen this happen with a number of his contemporaries, such as Saul Bellow and John Updike. However, our gut instinct is that this won’t be Roth’s fate—we think his work is more thoroughly embedded in the canon than that of any of his peers and, as we have seen with the recent renewed attention paid to The Plot Against America since Trump’s election, it continues to resonate powerfully in our contemporary moment.
Q: What do you feel have been your greatest achievements with the journal during your tenure, and what are you excited to see from the journal moving forward?
Deb and David: We are particularly proud of the number of younger scholars we have featured in the journal over the period of our editorship. One of these, Maren Scheurer, has now, together with Aimee Pozorski, taken over from us as Executive Co-Editor of the journal, and many others, who published their first peer-reviewed pieces with PRS, have gone on to establish themselves as important new voices in the discipline. Other notable features of our tenure have been the number of excellent special issues we have published and the range of other authors with whose work Roth’s has been placed in dialogue. Overall, the last five years have seen a significant extension of the parameters of Roth studies and we are proud that the journal has been at the forefront of this work. We are confident that Aimee and Maren will build on this legacy and continue to take Roth studies in new and exciting directions.
See more about Philip Roth Studies and subscription information.
Filed under: Uncategorized
May 6th, 2019
Purdue at 150: A Visual History of Student Life by David M. Hovde, Adriana Harmeyer, Neal Harmeyer, and Sammie L. Morris with a Foreword by Drew and Brittany Brees tells Purdue’s story through rare images, artifacts, and words. The authors culled decades of student papers from scrapbooks, yearbooks, letters, and newspapers to historical photographs and memorabilia preserved in the Purdue University Libraries Virginia Kelley Karnes Archives and Special Collections Research Center. Many of the images and artifacts included have never been published, presenting a unique history of the land-grant university from the student perspective.
What prompted the authors to undertake such a monumental task? Where do you start when you have the entirety of the archives as your source? We asked the authors to take us inside the process of making Purdue at 150.
Q: What prompted you to start this project?
David Hovde: I have spent most of my writing career, beginning in 1973, writing historical works. When I started to work in the Archives and Special Collections in 2006, I read everything I could about the history of Purdue using primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. Then, I started to teach classes about how to do historical research using archival resources. I quickly noticed that the students were far more attentive when I discussed material created by students from Purdue’s past rather than material about presidents and famous faculty. The students could relate to the students of the past. At the same time, I noted that few official histories really discussed students and their lives on campus. Their voices were largely silent. Since I have a long-standing interest in folklore, I also noticed how much of the campus folklore had little basis in fact. For a number of years, I mulled over the idea writing a book about student life and student customs and traditions. When the sesquicentennial was approaching, I presented the idea to Sammie Morris and the entire staff, and the rest so to speak is history. The book is a bit different than what I had envisioned years ago, but this is a collaborative effort and that collaboration brilliantly highlights the collections in the Purdue University Archives and Special Collections and is strengthened by the many voices of those who contributed to the final product.
Sammie Morris: The Archives and Special Collections unit began discussing and preparing for the Purdue sesquicentennial many years in advance. One thing we discussed early on was a coffee table type book that would include beautiful realistic facsimiles of treasures from the Archives that provide evidence of Purdue’s past. We tossed around ideas about a scrapbook style album, or something featuring historical images and student memorabilia. David Hovde had a suggestion that we work together on a book project and there was a lot of enthusiasm amongst the staff in the Archives on taking on this challenge. From the start, it was important to me that we focus on filling in gaps in the past histories of Purdue by telling stories of some of the lesser known individuals and events in our history. As John Norberg worked to create an updated comprehensive Purdue history we differentiated our books by focusing solely on student experiences and featuring only items that are part of the Archives and Special Collections’ holdings. In this way, we let the evidence existing in the Archives tell the story of Purdue’s past students, while being aware that there are many gaps in the archival record that we would like to fill and enhance in the future.
Q: How does one start the process of gathering all the materials needed for a project like this?
David: I began my post-college career as an archaeologist. Archival research is like archaeology. On a dig, you slowly and carefully peel back the layers of soil, recording the artifacts and their places on the site both horizontally and vertically and place each artifact in context with all the others on the site, sites in the region, and the time period the site represents. Archival research is much the same. Each document or artifact is a story and part of a larger whole. Each file, photograph, or box is a layer, and each relates to all the other files and boxes that tell the story of the site. A document is an artifact, a collection a layer, and each relates to other artifacts and collections temporally and spatially. The site in this case is the history of Purdue University. Each document, photograph, and artifact is equally as important as the others, and together they contribute to the story. This book has fifteen cultural layers that make up the site known as Purdue University.
As with any project, one starts looking at the secondary and tertiary sources and then the voice is chosen. In this case, the voice was the students. Then the structure is developed, and the researchers begins to look for primary sources, scrapbooks, photographs, letters, documents, etc., that bring the voice of the participant in the story to the forefront and gives the story life.
Prior to this, I had written a number of short articles about student traditions that would be the basis for a web site about Purdue student customs and traditions and to aid the staff to help students and researchers with questions about such things. These became elements of the future book. No one person in this collaboration knows all the collections. The authors each have their expertise and individual interests, but all wanted to give voice to the students who came and went over the past 145 years.
Adriana Harmeyer: We decided early on that we would let the archival materials tell the story. We reviewed the items in the Archives, thought about which ones are most interesting, surprising, and engaging, and built the story from there. There are some seminal moments and traditions that we knew would have to be included and were able to find archival materials that would illustrate them.
Sammie: It was a big undertaking. We wanted something new and fresh that didn’t retell past Purdue histories and we wanted something that would complement, rather than compete with, John Norberg’s forthcoming book. With 150 years of history come 150 years of documents, photos, and artifacts. There are thousands of boxes of these records in the archives, but we had to start somewhere. Once we decided to focus on student life and organizing the book by decade, it helped us to hone in on what collections we had on those topics. We also made a serious effort to seek out—to the best of our abilities—diverse stories and perspectives, focusing not exclusively on famous alumni, but rather trying to tell the story of the average student experience by decade. We wanted to show that all Purdue students played a role in shaping the university, and we wanted to represent as many voices and perspectives as possible.
Q: What was your favorite decade to research?
David: I would say the 1900s, since that was the decade the many of the long standing and most colorful traditions were established or codified.
Adriana: I really enjoyed diving into the 1910s. So much was happening at that time as enrollment grew, old traditions faded, and new traditions developed. By the end of the decade, World War I really helped define what Purdue and the community could offer to the world.
Neal Harmeyer: My favorite decade to research was the 2010s. Studying archival content from the very recent past helped me to connect current issues and topics to those from past decades.
Sammie: I love the 1930s, it’s this fascinating time in American history between the two world wars when art and design and culture are becoming more streamlined and modern, Prohibition was ending, Art Deco was popular, and women were beginning to have more freedom after earning the right to vote in 1920. It also happens to be the decade when two women heroes of mine joined Purdue: Lillian Gilbreth and Amelia Earhart. It was the decade when Purdue opened the first university-owned airport. I just feel like there was a lot of growth and excitement, at Purdue, and in the U.S. during the 1930s. There was this can-do spirit seen in photos and documents that seemed celebratory despite the effects of the Great Depression. It was a fascinating time of highs and lows.
Q: Was there a single photo that you enjoyed the most that sticks out to you?
David: One of the most difficult parts of a book like this is choosing the best photo to tell a particular story. Sometimes there could be three or four similar images you like, but only one can be used. I like the photo on page 24 of the students being students, the two women on page 28, and the three women on page 34 showing early campus life of women. I also like the victors and the defeated on page 41, particularly the look of concern by the student with 08 sign hung around his neck.
Adriana Harmeyer: There are so many great photos in this book! One that comes immediately to mind, probably because I had never seen it until this project, is of Olympian Clifford C. Furnas running through ankle-deep water at a state track meeting as crowds cheer him on. This photo originally appeared in the 1922 Debris Yearbook, a great source of historical images.
Neal Harmeyer: I enjoy many of the images within the book. One that stands out is an image of the entrance to campus at State and Marsteller Streets in the 1940s. The intersection looks very different today.
Q: What were some of your favorite photos that didn’t end up making it into the book?
David: The one that did not make it in the book, because it is so commonly used, is Fred Hovde walking with a group of young men, some in World War II military clothing. The confident stride and the smiles reflect the new beginnings, growth, and promise of Hovde’s vision of a comprehensive research university and the GI Bill.
Adriana Harmeyer: There is a nice photo album from the 1930s, called “Purdue Panels,” that is filled with campus scenes. My favorite part of it, though, is the cover, which has sketches of the Power Plant and Heavilon Hall. It is a simple but eye-catching illustration of what the most prominent features of campus were at that time.
Neal Harmeyer: My favorite photos that did not make the book were a comparison of State Street during and after the redevelopment project of the 2010s.
Q: Were there any Purdue legends or stories that you found to be untrue?
David: Gobs and gobs…In particular, all those that start with, “In John Purdue’s will…” He did not have a will and all those stories about no foreign language instruction, red brick, no building taller than University Hall, etc., are completely bogus.
Q: Neal, what is it like being involved in a project as a Purdue alum?
Neal Harmeyer: Working on this book as an alumnus was an interesting experience. I have spent many years in and around Purdue University, first as a student and later as a professional archivist, and through those experiences many historical details were already known to me. Yet, there are always new things to learn, and I was learned numerous facts during the research process. I found it fascinating each time a new fact was uncovered or myth debunked. Therefore, I am certain that anyone connected to Purdue will learn something from Purdue at 150.
Q: How similar is the work that you did for this book to the work that you do at the archives?
David: From the beginning, one of my roles was to recover lost bits of Purdue’s history and put dates, names, and context onto numerous photographs in the collection. Much of what is in the book cannot be found in other published Purdue histories.
Adriana Harmeyer: This book felt like a natural extension of our work in the Archives. We often assist researchers in identifying archival materials to help with their projects, and by working with these collections every day most of us have a good understanding of the broad strokes of Purdue history. This book gave us a chance to dive a little more deeply into the collections and piece together more of those historical details. I also manage the Archives social media accounts, so I am very familiar with identifying interesting images and writing descriptive text to accompany them.
Neal: As an archivist I am constantly helping researchers conduct their own research, creating metadata for collections and images alike, composing my findings, and enabling access to Archives and Special Collections content. Working on Purdue at 150 was similar to my daily activities, albeit with a longer research period.
Q: What do the archives provide to Purdue?
David: The Archives and Special Collection since its creation in 1913 strove to collect, arrange, describe, preserve, and make available the records of the University, staff, and alumni. It is not a mere collection because the highly trained professional and knowledgeable staff in the Archives bring the history of this institution to life and preserve it for the future.
Adriana: The Archives are the access point for these stories, housing the original documents, photographs, and objects that are part of the university’s history. However, we are not just a physical location, but a highly skilled team that can work with people through every step of the research process, from identifying primary sources for their research through to donating their own collections to the archives for future generations of researchers to study and enjoy.
Neal: I believe Archives and Special Collections provides unique opportunities for persons of all ages and educational backgrounds to self-discover and create new ideas. The collections with Archives and Special Collections document the histories of individuals, the university, and the community. A visitor may select, learn, and write about topics of their choosing, all while studying the original one-of-a-kind items of their creators. In turn, those studies generate new primary documents to be preserved for the next generations. Archives and Special Collections support research and learning. These are not only places of the past; they are places of the present and places of the future.
Sammie: The University Archives is the memory of Purdue. Here, we collect and manage the evidence of Purdue’s past activities, decisions, accomplishments, and the lives and contributions of its people. When a date or other fact needs to be checked, we provide the documentation for a reliable answer. But much more than that, the Archives is an accumulation of stories of the people who have shaped Purdue—the students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends of the University who have collectively made it what it is. It’s the Archives that preserves those memories for use by current and future generations of Boilermakers, and it’s the archivists who teach students how to do archival research and come to appreciate and connect with Purdue’s history. Finally, the Archives serves as the access point for scholars worldwide interested in writing books, articles, creating films, or exhibits on Purdue history; without the Archives, Purdue’s past would be an unreliable mix of rumors and hearsay, but most importantly, the legacies of so many ordinary people who helped build and sustain Purdue would be difficult to discover. I think the Archives make Purdue history real for people in a way that facts cannot; there is something exciting about learning through interacting with historical documents, photos, and memorabilia, old digital files and media. The past becomes, for a brief moment, the present when one interacts with these relics from history.
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Filed under: general, SPECMarch 27th, 2019
In his new book The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist (Purdue University Press March 2019), Julien Gorbach examines the life of great twentieth-century screenwriter, playwright, and activist Ben Hecht.
Gorbach treats Hecht’s activism during the 1940s as the central drama of his life. His new book details the story of how Hecht earned admiration as a humanitarian and vilification as an extremist at this pivotal moment in history, about the origins of his beliefs in his varied experiences in American media, and about the consequences.
Read on to see our discussion with the author about Hecht’s life, career, and legacy.
Q. Who was Ben Hecht and why is he significant?
Julien Gorbach: Ben Hecht was a legendary screenwriter, who was also known for breaking the silence in the American media about the Holocaust, and for his militant Zionism. He invented the gangster movie and wrote classics like Scarface, Gone with the Wind and Hitchcock’s Notorious. Hecht was a prolific reporter, novelist, and Broadway playwright. During the Holocaust and the struggle to establish the state of Israel, he was a major force as a propagandist. He became notorious, because of his inflammatory rhetoric and his partnership with Mickey Cohen, a Jewish gangster. Together they smuggled weapons to Palestine in the struggle for a Jewish state.
Q. How did Hecht find himself in the newspaper business, and what was the Chicago School of journalism?
Gorbach: He was introduced to the business through his uncle and quickly took to the work. I think it’s too simplistic to just dismiss Hecht as a cynic, though he was certainly influenced by the hardboiled attitude of other newshounds in his early days chasing stories. Reporters would do anything for a story and, given the fierce competition for scoops, would concoct more than a few. But Hecht’s cynical style ultimately reflected a strain of Romanticism. It was a dark view common among those who came of age during the Great War, the so-called Lost Generation. Like many who lived through the carnage of those years, Hecht developed a grim view of human nature and he looked back at the liberal Enlightenment-era optimism about mankind as naïve.
Q. How was he later influenced by the intellectuals, poets, writers he met in New York? Was The Front Page his breakthrough?
Gorbach: He came into himself as a dramatist in New York. In the 1920s one way to prove yourself was to write a blockbuster novel. Another way was to have a hit on Broadway, which is what Hecht and other friends of the Algonquin Roundtable crowd did. But New York was publicity-oriented, and Hecht found the city more superficial than Chicago. He famously said that he and his friends “were fools to have left Chicago,” but he knew most Midwest writers had to go to New York for their careers. The Front Page was a huge hit and made him famous. At about the same time, his 1927 movie Underworld launched the gangster movie craze, and he won Best Original Story for it at the first Academy Awards in 1929.
Q. How did Hecht get to Hollywood?
Gorbach: Hecht’s first hit movie was silent. When the talkies came in, writers were in demand. There’s the famous story about the telegram he received from Herman Mankiewicz, who said there were “millions to be grabbed out here, and the only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.” For writers, Hollywood was almost too good to be true.
Q. What happened to Hecht’s artistic ambitions and political ideals in Hollywood?
Gorbach: He once said: “We didn’t write movies. We shouted them into existence.” This wasn’t so far off. The writer’s room was a kind of clubhouse, especially since so many of Hecht’s friends from New York also came to Hollywood. He did feel compromised as a writer in Hollywood, so why did he keep at it? The truth is that Hecht was polyamorous—a skirt-chaser. He liked women and ran around with many. His playboy lifestyle ended up getting a bit out of hand, and reached a point where he had a lot of work to do just to make ends meet, keeping up his lavish life with his wife and his affairs. He wrote some great movies but also doctored scripts, doing many uncredited, piecemeal jobs under the table. His time was not spent on novels, which back then, especially, was considered the only real measure of great writers. And he did reach a breaking point, when his personal crises with his marriage and career and the global situation with Hitler all kind of came together at the same time.
Q. How was Hecht prescient about the Final Solution?
Gorbach: Hecht wrote “The Little Candle,” a short story, after Kristallnacht occurred in 1938. No one took from the event that there would be a genocide. That was beyond the imagination, or as the historian Deborah Lipstadt put it in the title of a book, Beyond Belief. But Hecht’s short story vividly describes the Holocaust. Critics said it was a powerful story but Hecht had an insane idea—that the Germans would actually kill a half million Jews.
Q. How did Pauline Kael establish Hecht as a screenwriting legend?
Gorbach: That emerged because of her debate with Andrew Sarris. The 1960s Sarris/Kael debate made film a serious art form for critical consideration. A major question was who is the true author of a film, the “auteur” or the writer? Kael said it was the screenwriter and pointed to Hecht’s groundbreaking contributions, saying artists like him made the movies great.
Q. How might Hecht be reassessed as a writer with a political legacy?
Gorbach: He remains a politically controversial figure, but his significance is his message, which remains especially important now, in the days of the Trump administration. All of Hecht’s work as a writer and an activist is shot through with his concerns about the “soul of man,” which is so fundamental to all the questions we face today about democracy. If we want to remain liberal and democratic, we have to remember what liberalism and democracy are about. We rely on people to be good, but why does the United States also tilt the playing field, for example, by favoring rural people over urban people with our Electoral College and Senate systems? What are the implications for democracy if people don’t turn out to be as good as we expect them to be, or aren’t as good in the ways we expect them to be? What are the implications of our darker nature, our tribalism for example, for our free press and our social media? What are the implications for our ideas of rights, like the Second Amendment, or for our treatment of immigrants and people of different backgrounds? Are we reckoning with the dark side of human nature realistically in our foreign policy, in the way we talk about questions of war and peace? What does our treatment of the environment, and other species, tell us of our nature? These questions are still wide open, and in Hecht’s day, there was more room for error about them. With nuclear weapons, climate change, and the other issues that we confront now, the stakes have gotten much higher.
Q. Do you feel a revival is due of his works in a play or movie festival? How might The Notorious Ben Hecht introduce new audiences to a writer in some ways ahead of his time?
Gorbach: This is in a way three books rolled into one. It tells the story of his Jewish activism, and the implications of that story for Israel, America and Jews everywhere today. It’s the story of a great writer who has never been properly understood or appreciated. And finally, it’s the story of “a child of the century,” a kind of wild tour through all these worlds of the last 100 years—Capone’s Chicago, New York in the ‘20s, Hollywood, World War II, etc. But altogether this is just one big story of an extraordinary life, with an appropriately dramatic arc and ending. I think when people read the story and learn who he is, they’ll appreciate him. But they’ll also understand and appreciate the message that he has for us today. In this book, you can hear him speaking to us, now.
The Notorious Ben Hecht is now available. Check out a free preview of the book.
Get 30% off when you order directly from the Purdue University Press website and enter the code “PURDUE30” at checkout.
Filed under: UncategorizedMarch 7th, 2019
That Sheep May Safely Graze (March 2019, Purdue University Press), by David Sherman, brings light to the human story of Afghanistan, the disruptive impact that decades long conflict has had on rural Afghans, their culture, and the timeless relationship they share with their land and their animals.
The book describes the story of one of the most successful and lasting U.S.-funded development programs in Afghanistan since the start of American nation-building efforts there in 2001. It is a story of bringing essential veterinary services to a society that depends day in and day out on the well-being and productivity of its animals, but also a society that had no reliable access to even the most basic animal health care.
The author of the book, David Sherman, has worked all over the world to provide essential veterinary services such as animal health service delivery, veterinary infrastructure development, transboundary animal disease control, goat health and production, and veterinary and veterinary para-professional education. His work has brought him to over 40 countries, working for a variety of international agencies including the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Bank, the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), Heifer International, and Farm Africa.
Prior to the book’s publication, we asked David Sherman about his personal experiences in Afghanistan, the way the world views the country, and more.
Q: What made you want to write about your experiences?
David Sherman: Several things. The United States has been involved militarily in Afghanistan indirectly or directly since 1979 and yet Americans remain largely unaware of the country, its history and its people. Having been involved in relief and development activities in Afghanistan since 1991, I have been able to gain a long-term experience with the country and its culture and I wanted to share that experience with a wider public. Also, for those who have followed events in Afghanistan, the prevailing view has been that billions of dollars have been spent on nation building with little to show for it. Therefore, I wanted to tell the story of our successful effort to provide sustainable animal health care in the country to a wider audience to illustrate that indeed, effective development in Afghanistan is possible. Finally, I wanted to invite readers to get to know some of the fine and decent Afghans with whom I worked, so that they can better appreciate the warmth, grace and resilience of these people in the face of the tremendous hardships and losses they have suffered.
Q: What is the best story that didn’t make it into the book?
Sherman: Oh, so many it is hard to choose. But there was one that epitomized the challenges of doing development work in Afghanistan. I was able to organize a collaborative effort between my employer, the Dutch Committee for Afghanistan, US Army Civil Affairs officers, a British NGO and several volunteer veterinary practitioners from the US to refurbish the teaching clinic at the Kabul University Veterinary Faculty and restore their desperately needed clinical teaching program for veterinary students. Unfortunately, after we had it up and running and farmers were bringing their livestock and expats were bringing their dogs and cats for treatment, the clinic was bulldozed to make way for the newly created American University of Afghanistan!
Q: How do you feel the world’s perception of what is going on in Afghanistan lines up with your own experiences there?
Sherman: Sadly, what the world hears about Afghanistan – widespread corruption, ineffective governance, the opium trade, instability, poverty, insurgency and violence are all true, but the tragedy is that the world hears only about these things. Afghanistan is a country of 35 million people, the vast majority of whom get on with their lives, demonstrating a remarkable inner strength. Every day, they go to work, to market, to school, to the mosque to pray, to the fields to tend their crops, to the pastures to tend their animals, to funerals to mourn their dead and to weddings as an affirmation of their hopefulness for a better future. What the world does not hear about is the dignity and humanity of these Afghan people and their desire for peace and a better life for their children.
Q: How would you explain the importance of the work you did to a layperson?
Sherman: Through our work, we were able to establish reliable access to clinical veterinary services throughout Afghanistan. This was a vitally important achievement. Afghanistan is mainly a rural society whose people still depends largely on agriculture. It is estimated that the livelihoods of up to eighty percent of the population depend directly or indirectly on livestock. Nomadic herders, of which there are millions in the country, depend almost completely on their livestock to survive. Since the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the prolonged fighting that followed to this day, what little veterinary service that had been available to farmers and herders through government had essentially disappeared. As a result, the nation’s livestock had succumbed to a wide range of preventable and treatable diseases due to lack of vaccines and medicines and personnel trained in their use. The livelihoods and well-being of livestock owners as well as the national economy suffered as a result.
While there were numerous relief efforts over the years to provide veterinary services through various donor projects, these interventions were not sustainable because the service was provided for free and the personnel were paid salaries. When the projects ended and the free medicines and salaries disappeared, so did the veterinary services. We took a different approach, recruiting and training young men and later women from their home districts, providing them with a six-month training along with the necessary equipment and supplies required to provide good quality clinical services to their home districts once they returned after training. We made it clear from the beginning that we would pay no salaries and that these trained paraveterinarians would have to charge for their services so that they could earn enough money to provide their own income and to purchase their resupply of additional medicines and vaccines to continue working. This private sector, fee for service model worked very well. Since the first paraveterinarians were trained in 2004, almost 90% of them continue to provide animal health care services to the farmers and herders in their districts, some now for almost 15 years. As a result, hundreds of jobs were created for paraveterinarians, the health, welfare and productivity of Afghanistan livestock have been improved and the livelihoods of rural Afghans enhanced throughout the country.
Q: What are the most important ways your work affects the general public?
Sherman: Throughout the developing world and even in some parts of the developed world, tens of millions of animal owners do not have access to reliable animal health care. There are many reasons – remoteness, lack of roads, telecommunication and other infrastructure, war, civil unrest, misguided policies, insufficient numbers of veterinarians, lack of economic incentive for veterinarians to serve small holder farmers and nomads, poverty and inadequate knowledge of the benefits of veterinary services. The fee for service, private sector, community-based veterinary paraprofessional model for sustainable animal health care delivery that we refined in Afghanistan can serve as a model to improve access to veterinary services around the world.
The benefits of regular access to reliable animal health care are many, particularly in developing countries. Healthy, vaccinated animals offer protection against the disaster of unexpected loss of flocks and herds to disease, improved food security, better nutrition, increased income, expanded opportunities for value chain development in the livestock sector and even social stability for communities that depend on animals for their survival.
Q: If you could have readers take one thing away from this book, what would that be?
Sherman: If I may, I would like to quote a passage from the book to sum up what I would like readers to take away from it. “Sadly, despite so many years of American involvement, the Afghan people remain largely invisible to most Americans, and their hopes and aspirations, so similar to our own, remain unknown. My life has been enormously enriched by the many years spent in their midst and I have grown to love some individual Afghans as if they were my own family. The Afghan people are not faceless ciphers, conniving thieves, ruthless terrorists, and rabid fundamentalists. All societies are complex and contain undesirable elements. It is true of Afghan society as it is true of our own. The Afghans I worked with and came to know well are decent, hardworking people. They are generous, hospitable, good-humored, trustworthy, and devoted to family and community. They have deep and abiding religious faith. Afghans are proud of their country’s beauty, its varied cultures, and its long, rich history. Most of all, Afghans are resilient. They have suffered in ways over the past thirty years that most of us cannot even imagine. They want and deserve better. They want and deserve peace, security, prosperity, and a hopeful future.”
As I write this, the American government is engaged in peace talks with the Taliban. I pray that respect for the quality of life and the basic human rights of ordinary Afghans, especially Afghan women, is on the agenda.
That Sheep May Safely Graze: Rebuilding Animal Health Care in War-Torn Afghanistan is available now. Check out a free preview of the book.
Get 30% off when you order directly from the Purdue University Press website and enter the code “PURDUE30” at checkout.
Filed under: Uncategorized
November 27th, 2018
To prepare for the release of the 36.3 issue of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Purdue University Press interviewed contributor Jay Michaelson about religion, writing, and more.
Michaelson is an affiliated assistant professor at Chicago Theological Seminary, where his work focuses on the intersection of queer studies and Jewish theology. His scholarly publications include “Queering Kabbalistic Gender Dimorphism,” “Hating Law for Christian Reasons: The Religious Roots of American Anti-lawyerism,” and “Chaos, Law, and God: The Religious Meanings of Homosexuality.” His books include Everything Is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism (Trumpeter, 2009) and God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality (Beacon, 2011). A book based on his doctoral dissertation, Jacob Frank: From Jewish Antinomianism to Esoteric Myth, is presently under review. He holds a PhD in Jewish thought from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a JD from Yale Law School, and nondenominational rabbinic ordination.
Michaelson’s article “Queering Martin Buber: Harry Hay’s Erotic Dialogical?” appears in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, volume 36, issue 3.
“In certain gay subcultures, Harry Hay’s philosophy is well-known and actively practiced, and yet there’s very little awareness there of its close relationship to Buber’s. At first, I was interested in possible influences; as the research went on, this morphed into an interest in phenomenological affinities and differences, and how the two thinkers could complement one another.”
“As an “alt-ac” with a long-term visiting position at Chicago Theological Seminary but a primary career outside the academy, there’s a certain freedom in being able to write scholarly articles on a wide variety of subjects, and I certainly make use of that. In addition, I’m interested in bridging discourses between “high” philosophers such as Buber and outsider thinkers like Hay. I’m not sure Hay is (or deserves to be) taken seriously by proper philosophy scholars, and yet there’s something quite interesting in his eroticizing of the dialogical that I think is worthy of analysis.”
“It depends on the work. In the case of this article, I was interested in trying to assess, based on the textual evidence, how these similar but divergent dialogical philosophies might be experienced in practice, rather than solely on the page. I think that’s informed by my work in the contemplative world. At the same time, I’m extremely wary of imposing any of my own experiences onto the subjects at hand.”
“I feel like I’ve written a book on that subject.… I think for many people, myself included, the Buddha Dharma provides a less theologically freighted set of contemplative practices that can enrich a Jewish communal and ritual life. The questions Buddhism asks about suffering and the end of suffering are complementary to those Judaism asks about justice and relationship to the Divine. I see them as having different conversations.”
“In terms of the work, I think there’s a constant awareness of the justice impacts of any idea under consideration, including those in this article. For example, for all of Hay’s genius, the problem of essentialism, which I discuss in the article, is particularly glaring in the context of nationalism, ethnocentrism, and threats to democracy. As soon as one group of people declares itself intrinsically different from and better than another, we’re in trouble.”
“Certainly this particular article reflects my own identity as queer person on the one hand, and on the other as an American Jew who encountered popularizations of Buber at an early, formative age.”
“I’d be happy simply to introduce mainstream Jewish studies scholars to considering the sex-negative and implicitly queer-negative elements in various forms of philosophical discourse. There have been some excellent encounters recently between queer/LGBTQ studies and Jewish studies, and I’d be thrilled for this to be another of them.”
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies is a triannual publication that produces original, peer-reviewed scholarly articles, issues on special topics, book forums, review essays, and the occasional forum on Contemporary Critical Jewish Studies. Shofar reaches an international readership with an impressive range of reliably robust offerings primarily in modern history, literature, culture, and the arts. Shofar’s special issues have covered a wide range of timely subjects, including Diaspora and exile in modern Jewish culture, the transcultural generation in Israeli literature, race and Jews in America, and Holocaust and genocide cinema. To learn more about or subscribe to Shofar, visit: www.shofarjournal.org.
Filed under: UncategorizedSeptember 14th, 2018
A revised and expanded paperback edition of Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Time of Gus Grissom by George Leopold will be released on September 15th. In preparation for the release, the press interviewed Leopold to find out more behind his inspiration in writing the book, some thoughts on the book’s subject, and more.
Q: What inspired you to write a book? How did you come across Gus Grissom as a subject?
Leopold: The standard narrative of the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union is divided into two parts: before and after what came to be known simply as The Fire, the catastrophe that killed Gus Grissom and his Apollo 1 crew. After NASA recovered, the contributions of Gus Grissom were mostly forgotten—misremembered, really, when Tom Wolfe published The Right Stuff. Wolfe’s depiction of Grissom in his book and especially in the film version is a cartoon character. Wolfe got it wrong.
This struck me and many others as unjust. I determined to correct the record by writing a biography of Gus Grissom that places his life and career in the context of history of manned spaceflight.
I resolved to write his biography while standing before Gus Grissom’s grave in a lonely section of Arlington National Cemetery.
It only me took seven years.
Q: You have mentioned in previous interviews that you feel Grissom is underappreciated. Given his importance to early space exploration, how do you feel this happened?
Leopold: Part of its was Grissom’s unwillingness to toot his own horn. Gus always said the pre-flight press conferences were harder than the actual space missions. Another factor was the serendipitous nature of the early Project Mercury crew assignments. Most remember Alan Shepard’s first flight and John Glenn’s orbital flight. Grissom was remembered mostly for losing his first spacecraft.
And there was little reward or notoriety outside of his own peer group for the long hours at the factory doing the tedious testing required to get the Gemini and Apollo spacecraft into orbit. Grissom was engineering test pilot by training. All he really wanted to do was to go faster and higher—all the way to the moon and back. He cared not a whit about personal prestige, but he worked tirelessly to ensure the United States was first on the moon. Without Grissom’s contributions, I’m convinced we would not have made it by the end of the 1960s as we so declared.
Q: What do you imagine the space program would look like today if the Apollo 1 mission had been a success?
Leopold: It’s hard to say. Space exploration is a deadly business. If the Apollo 1 fire had not occurred on the launch pad, an accident in space would have been worse because investigators would know next to nothing about the precise cause(s). One of the cruel ironies, the central paradox of the Space Race, was that a launch pad fire actually saved the Apollo program. The reason was the evidence of what had been overlooked in Grissom’s ship—the faulty wiring, the leaking coolant, the lack of flame-retardant materials in the spacecraft, the clumsy inward opening hatch and, most important of all, NASA’s misguided engineering decision to use pure oxygen under pressure on the launch pad—all of it was there for the investigators to sift through.
To its credit, NASA rose from the ashes and built a great machine that took 24 humans to the moon.
Q: What are some things you believe the average person would be most surprised to know about the early age of space exploration?
Leopold: What a risky enterprise this was and the price the astronauts’ families paid. That, and the fact that Grissom and the early astronauts were test pilots who did not fly by the seat of their pants. They accepted risks, but they always sought to minimize them and come back alive. Gus Grissom is widely quoted as saying the rewards outweighed the risks (I never did track down the precise origin of Grissom’s iconic “worth the risk” quote, but he did say something close to this.) Hence, my thesis is that Grissom calculated those risks, dangers that every astronaut had to accept, and determined to proceed.
That decision cost him and his Apollo crew their lives, and shattered their families.
Q: What were some of the changes made for the new edition of the book? What makes it worthwhile for the person who has already read the original?
Leopold: For starters, the new Afterword describes how NASA finally provided a measure of closure for the Grissom, White, and Chaffee families. It’s an account of the 50th anniversary observance of the Apollo 1 fire. Gus Grissom’s brother Lowell did me the honor of an invitation to attend the ceremonies at Cape Canaveral, Florida. NASA at long last did right by the crew, mounting a permanent Apollo 1 exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center that includes the scorched hatches. The NASA exhibit also includes photos of Gus Grissom first published in Calculated Risk.
I and others have long argued that some part of the spacecraft should be displayed in a dignified way to remind future generations of the sacrifices of the early astronauts. NASA did just that. The exhibit was long overdue.
Further, we believe the updated version is more readable, and benefited from the kind of crowdsourcing that occurs when a book on an important subject is published. A scholarly peer review process, enabled by social media, identified a few areas for improvement. The result, we firmly believe, is the authoritative account of Gus Grissom’s life and career.
Q: You have spent countless hours researching and interviewing for this book. What is your favorite story that didn’t make it in?
Leopold: Not left out, merely overlooked until recently. When the Apollo 1 crew assignment was announced during a press conference in Houston in March 1966, a reporter asked about the protocol for deciding which two astronauts on each three-man crew would land and walk on the lunar surface during later Apollo missions. A NASA manager started in with a long technical answer.
Grissom listened for a moment, smiled and jumped in—getting right to the point: “If it was this crew, it would be me and somebody else!”
Q: Do you think that Grissom’s reputation has improved? Are there steps you would like to see taken to ensure his place in space history?
Leopold: I’d venture to say Gus Grissom is beloved, especially by those who knew him and understood his competence, dedication, and willingness to work and sacrifice. Those contributions to manned space exploration are certainly more appreciated now than, say, the late 1970s and early 1980s when The Right Stuff narrative held sway. The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire, for which the release of this biography was timed, also contributed to greater appreciation of Grissom’s central role.
My subject would undoubtedly be amused by all the fuss….
I am currently working with a group seeking to place a memorial at Arlington National Cemetery to honor the Apollo 1 crew. Gus Grissom and his crew mate and fellow Purdue alumnus Roger Chaffee are buried at Arlington. Surprisingly, there is no monument there commemorating the crew’s sacrifice—as there are for the astronauts lost in the two Space Shuttle accidents. The Apollo 1 memorial at Arlington National Cemetery was authorized by Congress, and we hope to have one in place during a future NASA Day of Remembrance for the Apollo 1 and shuttle crews.
Q: If you could ask Gus Grissom himself one question, what would it be?
Leopold: I would ask about his state of mind in the last weeks of his life, which must have been hell. He knew he had a faulty spacecraft on his hands, but he and the others figured they could fix it as they had done before. In that respect, Gus Grissom was a fatalist.
George Leopold is a veteran technology journalist and science writer who has covered the nexus between technology and policy for over thirty years. Leopold has written extensively about U.S. manned spaceflight, including the Apollo and space shuttle programs. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Scientist, and a variety of other science and technology publications. He resides in Reston, Virginia. Follow him on Twitter!
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Filed under: general
May 10th, 2018
In order to celebrate National Pet Week we reached out to the editors of our book series, New Directions in the Human-Animal Bond, to ask them a few short questions about the series and their own pets. Both series editors are at the College of Veterinary Medicine, Purdue University. Alan Beck, ScD is director of the Center of the Human-Animal Bond and the Dorothy N. McAllister Professor of Animal Ecology; and Marguerite (Maggie) E. O’Haire, PhD is an assistant professor of human-animal interaction in the Department of Comparative Pathobiology.
O’Haire: I have 2 dogs – Milo and Chloe. My dogs are both rescues. We recently did the dog DNA testing and Milo is a Beagle/Jack Russel Terrier mix and Chloe is an American Foxhound. Milo is almost 4 years old and Chloe is almost 14 years old.
Beck: I now have two dogs, Lili (brown & white) and Luci (black & white); both rescue mutts. Two photos of Lili at two different ages.
O’Haire: I have always been fascinated by how and why people interact with animals. I am motivated to bring strong science to an area that has often been underappreciated by the scientific community.
Beck: Growing up in crowded Brooklyn, we had no pets, indeed very few people did. I would walk to the dumps to watch birds and rats. As a graduate student I studied the stray dogs of Baltimore and became fascinated with how people interacted with pets; the interactions changed the behavior and even the health of both the people and pets. I changed my focus of study and soon after moving to Indiana, I joined the ranks of dog owner.
O’Haire: The New Directions in the Human-Animal Bond series is a great venue to translate human-animal bond science into everyday language to reach a broader audience. We love receiving new submissions and look forward to continuing to help bright and innovative scholars share their work through the Purdue University Press.
Beck: The New Directions series begins to capture the many aspects of our relationship with animals, not always what you would like, but all part of the mutual world shared by people and their animals. Of great value, the series allows insights to major facets not always studied but still very important.
The New Directions in the Human-Animal Bond series is published by Purdue University Press in collaboration with Purdue University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. It expands our knowledge of the interrelationships between people, animals, and their environment. Manuscripts are welcomed on all aspects of human-animal interaction and welfare, including therapy applications, public policy, and the application of humane ethics in managing our living resources.
The staff at the Purdue University Press loves our pets, too! Check out some pictures that we featured last month on National Pet Day!
Filed under: general