Animals of the Royal Geographical Society

In 2021, I was fortunate to be awarded one of eleven Wiley Digital Archive Fellowships. This fellowship grants access to the Royal Geographical Society’s pre-1945 digitised collections. The RGS, in collaboration with Wiley, have digitised hundreds of thousands of items, hosted on an online platform (the Wiley Digital Archive).
In this fellowship, I am interested in human-animal histories of various kinds: (1) the use of animal labour in supporting expeditions; (2) friendships and collaborations between geographers and their companion animals; (3) interspecies conflict in encounters with animals along the way; and (4) geographers mapping discovered species, expanding our knowledge of the other-than-human world. Each of these human-animal histories offers interesting new ways of thinking about multispecies histories, but also in understanding geography and space as always more-than-human