Karl Steel

Karl Steel is assistant professor of English at Brooklyn College, CUNY. He is the author of How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (The Ohio State University Press, 2011) and a number of articles on animals, materiality, and ecotheory. He is also co-editor, with Peggy McCracken, of "The Animal Turn" (postmedieval 2.1 2011) and, since 2006, has been one of the co-bloggers at In the Middle (www.inthemedievalmiddle.com).

Essays by this author

Against Animal Authenticity, Against the Forced March of the Now: a review of Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital

by
Karl Steel
2014-09-07

In one half of a pair of critical reviews looking at recent titles in animal studies, Karl Steel examines Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital (Shukin reviews Steel in the other half). In particular, Steel looks at Shukin’s biopolitical framework, and considers how that framework challenges not only our conception of what constitutes the animal, but also–and more to the bone–our conception of the capacity of fields like animal studies.