New Books Network

About Akash Ondaatje

Akash is a Research Associate at Know History. He studied at McGill University (B.A. History) and Queen’s University (M.A. History), where he researched human-animal relations and transatlantic exchanges in eighteenth-century British culture through his thesis, Animal Ascension: Elevation and Debasement Through Human-Animal Associations in English Satire, 1700-1820 (https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/handle/1974/27991). Contact: 17amo2@queensu.ca

Akash Ondaatje is a Research Associate at Know History. He studied at McGill University (B.A. History) and Queen’s University (M.A. History), where he researched human-animal relations and transatlantic exchanges in eighteenth-century British culture. Contact: 17amo2@queensu.ca

NBN Episodes hosted by Akash:

Animal Studies June 7, 2021

Animalia

An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times

Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani

Hosted by Akash Ondaatje
From yaks and vultures to whales and platypuses, animals have played central roles in the history of British imperial control. The contributors to Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times …
Animal Studies June 4, 2021

Animals as Legal Beings

Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders

Maneesha Deckha

Hosted by Akash Ondaatje
In Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders (University of Toronto Press, 2021), Maneesha Deckha critically examines how Canadian law and, by extension, other legal orders around the world …
Literary Studies May 20, 2021

Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel

Jason H. Pearl

Hosted by Akash Ondaatje
Historians of the Enlightenment have studied the period’s substantial advances in world cartography, as well as the decline of utopia imagined in geographic terms. Literary critics, meanwhile, have assessed the …
Literary Studies April 6, 2021

The Shortest Way with Defoe

Robinson Crusoe, Deism, and the Novel

Michael B. Prince

Hosted by Akash Ondaatje
A scholarly and imaginative reconstruction of the voyage Daniel Defoe took from the pillory to literary immortality, The Shortest Way with Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Deism, and the Novel (University of Virginia Press …
Latin American Studies February 8, 2021

Magdalena, River of Dreams

A Story of Colombia

Wade Davis

Hosted by Akash Ondaatje
Travelers often become enchanted with the first country that captures their hearts and gives them license to be free. For Wade Davis, it was Colombia. In his new book Magdalena, River …
Animal Studies January 5, 2021

Animal City

The Domestication of Urban America

Andrew A. Robichaud

Hosted by Akash Ondaatje
Americans once lived alongside animals. They raised them, worked them, ate them, and lived off their products. This was true not just in rural areas but also in cities, which …
Animal Studies November 17, 2020

Insect Artifice

Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt

Marisa Anne Bass

Hosted by Akash Ondaatje
In Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt (Princeton UP, 2019) Marissa Anne Bass explores the moment when the seismic forces of the Dutch Revolt wreaked havoc on …
Animal Studies October 23, 2020

A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path

Animal Metaphors in an Eastern Indonesian Society

Gregory Forth

Hosted by Akash Ondaatje
Gregory Forth, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Alberta and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, has studied the Nage people of the eastern Indonesian island of …