“I always feel a little uneasy at looking back at people creating things with so little support and pre-established protocols, without necessarily thinking about the social, racial, and colonial motivations that made them act the way that they did,” explained Antoine Traisnel, assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Michigan currently exploring 19th-century science’s relationship with animals. “This isn’t a way to excuse him, as opposed to understanding what made [his writings] the way they were.”
