Disanimality: When Disability, Illness, and Animality Meet
A book launch with Michael Lundblad

The Posthumanities Hub returns in 2026-2027 with a launch webinar for Michael Lundblad’s book, Disanimality: When Disability, Illness, and Animality Meet, recently out with Oxford University Press.

If you are an advocate for people with disabilities, should you also be vegan? How does your position on assisted suicide relate to how you think about euthanizing pets? Drawing on contemporary novels, films, and memoirs, Disanimality raises a series of important questions at the intersection of disability studies, animal studies, and posthumanism.

Recent work in disability studies has called for greater engagement with animal studies, but disability activists and scholars have long been uncomfortable with comparisons between animals and people with disabilities or chronic and terminal illnesses. The long and problematic history of dehumanizing and animalizing disabled people has often led to the need to reclaim their humanity and basic human rights. What, then, should be the relationship between disability and animal rights?

When? Thurs 24 September, 15.00-17.00 CET

Where? Via Zoom: https://liu-se.zoom.us/j/7402234640?omn=68809692825

Michael Lundblad is Professor of English-Language Literature at the University of Oslo. He is the author of The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture (Oxford UP), the editor of Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human ,and the co-editor, with Marianne DeKoven, of Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and Cultural Theory. He is also the editor of special issues of New Literary History on “Animality/Posthumanism/Disability”.