Peter Braden

Peter Braden encourages historians to see Chinese society as a multispecies formation of intelligent beings who lived, worked, and died together. By reading documents generated by humans who interacted with animals alongside current scientific and veterinary literature, historians can attempt to understand the inner lives and experiences of animals who left no written records.

His first book project is on the lives of cattle in China during the military, economic, and technological upheavals of the mid-twentieth century. In his second project, he explores the roles and experiences of rodents in the making of the life sciences in modern China. These projects show how decades of state violence and economic turmoil affected the social bonds, diets, medical care, labor, sexuality, and death of sentient animals including, but not limited to, Homo sapiens.