Environmental Humanities Fellow, March - May 2021
Brett Buchanan is a Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at Laurentian University (Sudbury, Canada). From 2014 to 2020 he was the Director of the School of the Environment. His research interests concern the intersections of environmental humanities, continental philosophy, philosophies of nature and the environment, and animal studies. Brett is the author of Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze (SUNY Press, 2008) and has translated a range of influential European animal studies scholars including Vinciane Despret’s What Would Animals Say if We Asked the Right Questions? (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). He will be working on two research projects in his fellowship: (i) philosophical ethology, including the translation of writers Dominique Lestel (L’animalité) and Vinciane Despret, and (ii) an historical and critical reading of the early 20th century “nature fakers” controversy, reading the wild animal stories as instances of animal philosophy and philosophical ethology, in conversation with contemporary nature writing and artistic practices of being and thinking like an animal. More info: www.laurentian.ca/bbuchanan