Thursday 17 June 7:30 – 8:30PM Lecture theatre , McDougall Hall, UPEI Dr. Harriet Ritvo Massachusetts Institute of Technology “Silent Partners: Animals in Human Environmental History” The history of our species has unfolded in constant relation to that of other animals, even before we began to live with them. Domestication produced enormous changes in human economies and societies, as well as in environmental conditions, affecting land use, biodiversity, and susceptibility to disease, among other things. These impacts have continued to the present time, in forms that have shifted to reflect the various cultures in which humans and animals cohabit. Beginning in the early modern period, British livestock husbandry emphasized efficiency and profitability, concerns that also characterized British culture more generally. They resulted in the improvement or intensification of strategies of both breeding and animal management, and were transmitted, albeit with significant modifications, to the British colonies in eastern North America. Biography Harriet Ritvo is the Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at MIT, where she teaches British history, environmental history, and the history of natural history. She is the author of The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Victorian Environmentalism; The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination; The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age; and the forthcoming Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History.