Susan McHugh, ‘Just Fairy Tales? Beyond the Scientific Schism between Plant and Animal Fables’

(Chair: Robert McKay)

I apologise for forgetting to press the record button at the beginning of the session, which means the video starts midway through Robert McKay’s introduction to Susan McHugh’s talk. However, this gives me the perfect excuse to reproduce Robert’s fantastic introduction in full. Please see it below before listening to Susan’s wonderful keynote. This talk was given as the first keynote speech at the Rethinking Fables final conference on May 22, 2025, at the University of Kent, Canterbury. (Kaori)

It is a great pleasure to introduce Susan McHugh’s keynote today.

I have been trying to think of a way to quickly characterise Susan, who I have known and been inspired by for more than 25 years, and the best I can come up with is this: Susan is the Katherine Hepburn of literary animal studies.

Like Hepburn, Susan was producing brilliant, method-opening, highly praised work when her field was barely in its infancy: such as her astonishing reading of racialised species affects in Planet of the Apes, or her

you-will-never-see-animals-or-literature-the-same-way-again

essay about queer animalities in JR Ackerley’s writing, also from 2000. That one remains, for me, the best animal studies work ever published in Critical Inquiry: who was Jacques Derrida following with his one of these? He was following Susan!

Anyway, back to Hepburn. Like hers — Susan’s work is characterised by fizzing energy and utter panache — as in her scintillating book Dog, where she found a way of writing about animals and human-animal relations that combines thrill and wonder at scientific knowledge with insight and novel cultural analysis; or in the utterly cool essay from 2012 with hands down the best title of all time “Bitch, Bitch, Bitch: Personal Criticism, Feminist Theory and Dog Writing”.

Like Hepburn, too, Susan’s work is characterised by excelling across an astonishingly wide range; she has the startling (and envy-inducing) capacity to change minds and hearts about whatever animal topic she is writing on — whether that is visually impaired fictional detectives and their dogs in 2011’s Animal Stories, the personal and cultural meaning of Jane Goodall, in 2009’s “Sweet Jane”, or the racist biopolitics driving genocides and extinctions, and the narratives of love that can resist them in her profound and moving book Love in a Time of Slaughters (2019).

A last thing that made Hepburn truly unique was the persistent and quietly radical influence of her  persona, and this is true of Susan too. Across her career, Susan has shown us how to be an academic: by fostering and caring for our field through her enormous, unstinting editorial efforts – count them! eight co-edited volumes and nearly 50 series-edited books across two series; 20 years of editorial work for the field’s key journal; attention and care to fledge undergraduate researchers; and supportive collaborations with junior scholars and (frankly) near golden pond ones like me.

I won’t push the comparison any further – although if it was up to me Susan would have 4 Oscars, and I don’t doubt that if you need someone to rock a culotte or assuage a recalcitrant terrier like Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby then Susan’s your gal too.

So I am truly delighted to introduce Susan McHugh, a scholar without whom I certainly wouldn’t be here today.

— Robert McKay

Susan McHugh is Professor of English at the University of New England, USA. All of her research and some of her teaching focus on literary, visual, and scientific stories of species. She is the author of three monographs: Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Extinction and Genocide (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019), Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), and Dog (Reaktion, 2004; 2019). McHugh has numerous edited collections, which include Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges, and the Arts: Human-Animal Studies in Modern Worlds (2017; with Wendy Woodward); Animal Satire (2022; with Robert McKay), and, with Garry Marvin, the four-volume collection Human-Animal Studies (2018) as well as The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies (2014). McHugh’s ongoing research focuses on animal and plant studies.