Becoming a Lion’s Historian: more-than-human solutions for living on planet earth
Welcome to the first EHL Brown Bag of the semester with Sandra Swart, incoming visiting Professor of Anthropocene History, who will share with us her work on becoming a lion's historian, and how to live together with multispecies in a shared world.
There is an African proverb “Until the lion has a historian of his own, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” I take up the challenge of this proverb and, with this talk, explain how to become the lion’s historian. As a species, we humans are not alone; but our history has been written as though we were. Today, I will offer a multispecies retelling of our more-than-human past and argue why such histories are useful in thinking about how to live together in a shared world. Embracing a radical interdisciplinarity informed by a background in history and environmental studies, I will combine the natural sciences with the social sciences, oral history, indigenous knowledge, and archival research, to offer a new way to understand animals’ roles in our history. I will focus on a unique relationship deep in the Kalahari Desert between two apex predators … people and lions.
Sandra Swart is Chair of the Department and Professor of History, University of Stellenbosch, Director, African Anthropocenes Research Center, at Stellenbosch University, Senior Research Associate, Centre for World Environmental History at Sussex University, and Visting Professor of Anthropocene History, at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. She received her DPhil in Modern History from Oxford University in 2001, while simultaneously obtaining an MSc in Environmental Change and Management, also at Oxford. She studies the socio-environmental history of southern Africa, with a particular focus on the shifting relationship between humans and animals. Recent books include co-editing with E. O’Gorman, M. Carey and W.San Martín of The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History (2023), and with a collective, Gender and Animals in History (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) and award-winning The Lion’s Historian– Africa’s Animal Past (Jacana Press, 2023, Ohio University Press, 2025).
