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:

A. Burton and R. Mawani, "Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times" (Duke UP, 2020)

June 7, 2021

Animalia

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 Ani…

Maneesha Deckha, "Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders" (U Toronto Press, 2021)

June 4, 2021

Animals as Legal Beings

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 Canad…

Jason H. Pearl, "Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel" (U Virginia Press, 2014)

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 geog…

Michael B. Prince, "The Shortest Way with Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Deism, and the Novel" (U Virginia Press, 2020)

April 6, 2021

The Shortest Way with Defoe

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: Robi…

Wade Davis, "Magdalena, River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia" (Knopf, 2020)

February 8, 2021

Magdalena, River of Dreams

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.…

Andrew A. Robichaud, "Animal City: The Domestication of Urban America" (Harvard UP, 2019)

January 5, 2021

Animal City

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 b…

Marisa Anne Bass, "Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt" (Princeton UP, 2019)

November 17, 2020

Insect Artifice

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 Dutc…

Gregory Forth, "A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path: Animal Metaphors in an Eastern Indonesian Society" (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019)

October 23, 2020

A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path

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 …