Book talk with Dr. Surekha Davies: Humans: A Monstrous History
Renaissances at èצӰ
Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
Followed by discussion of writingcommercial nonfiction historyas anearly modernist
“This is a book about monster-making: the stories societies tell about who they think isn’tnormal or typical—the process of defining people as something outside normal categories,as something monstrous.”—Surekha Davies, from the Introduction
HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY BySurekha Davies
A powerful and provocative history of how humans have created monsters out of oneanother—and what these monsters tell us about humanity's present and future. From ancient gods to generative AI, from Dracula to E.T.,and from Hannibal Lecter to the Menendezbrothers,monsterssaturate our culture:on the big screen, in the pages of our books, in the news, and inour social media feeds. But what is it that defines a monster? What, exactly, makes something orsomeone so monstrous?
InHUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY (University of California Press; February 2025), award-winning historian Dr. SurekhaDavies seeks to answerthese questions, taking readers on a fascinating journey throughour extensive history of monster-making.Exploring humankind’slong historywith monsters—how we have created,classified, andidentified them throughout the ages—sheexplains how monsters are, at their core,marked by the idea of otherness.Who and what we see as a threat becomes subhuman; when wedistinguish “self”from “the rest” we create a monster lurking somewhere outside of societal norms.Andwhen we relate our fellow humans to everything from apes to witches to zombies, we place themoutside the realm ofthe normal—a fundamental process in inventingvarious racial, gender, and ethnicstereotypes.
*Graduate students who rsvp in advance torrogers [at] stanford.edu (rrogers[at]stanford[dot]edu)will get a chance to win one of the 20 copies of the book we'll have available, signed by the author. *