This talk rethinks the status of animals in fiction by theorizing the novel as a form of multispecies ecology: as a milieu. Positioning novels from the nineteenth century to the contemporary alongside of shifting ideas of milieu, from Lamarck and Bernard to Canguilhem and Wynter to recent studies in comparative cognition, Cohn shows how literary milieus promote dialogue across disciplines while offering distinctive ways of knowing our imperiled multispecies world.

About the speaker

Elisha Cohn is Professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. She is the author of Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Milieu: a Creaturely Theory of the Contemporary Novel (Stanford University Press, 2025), as well as co-editor, with Juliette Atkinson, of the Oxford Handbook of George Eliot (2025). She has also published essays in Contemporary Literature, Victorian Studies, Journal of Victorian Culture, Post-45, and Public Books.