S5 E2 - Surekha Davies on Humans: A Monstrous History

Today on The HPS Podcast, Thomas Spiteri speaks with Dr. Surekha Davies, historian of science, art and ideas, and author of the new book Humans: A Monstrous History (University of California Press). Surekha’s research explores how ideas about humanity have been shaped by encounters with what did not seem to fit. She draws on visual, material and textual sources to show how people have imagined and defined the human across time.

In this episode, Surekha:

• Traces her path into HPS, from Star Trek dreams to Renaissance studies
• Explains why visual and material sources are crucial to understanding early modern science
• Introduces her book Humans: A Monstrous History
• Tell us about how monstrosity functioned as an epistemic tool for organising knowledge and drawing conceptual boundaries
• Examines how these ideas influenced concepts of gender, race and empire

If you’ve ever wondered how the strange and unfamiliar shaped science, culture, and our understanding of humanity, this episode is for you.

Relevant Links:
Surekha Davies Website
Humans: A Monstrous History ((University of California Press, 2025)
Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Thanks for listening to The HPS Podcast. You can find more about us on our website, Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook feeds. 

This podcast would not be possible without the support of School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant scheme.

Music by ComaStudio.
Website HPS Podcast | hpsunimelb.org

Transcript

Welcome back to the HPS Podcast, A podcast where we chat all things history, philosophy, and social studies of science. 

Today we're joined by Dr Surekha Davies, a historian of science, art, and ideas, and a self-described monster consultant. Her work explores how ideas about the human have been shaped through encounters with what defies familiar categories, drawing on sources ranging from maps to literature and pop culture. 

In this episode, Surekha introduces her new book: Humans: A Monstrous History. 

The book is a sweeping account of how notions of monstrosity from antiquity to the present have defined what it means to be a human. She shows that monsters understood as category breakers were not mere curiosities or symbols of the abnormal, but tools for thinking, shaping how knowledge was organised, how boundaries between humans and everything else – animals, machines, gods – were drawn, and how concepts of race, gender, and normality evolved. 

Along the way, Surekha reflects on her path into HPS, the epistemic power of visual and material sources, and why examining what falls outside accepted categories can reveal so much about the making of knowledge itself. 

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Thomas Spiteri: Hi Surekha. Thanks so much for joining us today. 

Surekha Davies: Thank you for having me. 

[00:01:24] 

Thomas Spiteri: To start, could you tell us how you first came to the history and philosophy of science? 

Surekha Davies: It started with too much Star Trek in my childhood, and I spent most of my life wanting to be an intergalactic explorer before I got to university. Once I got to Cambridge, it turned out that being a scientist was not like being Captain Picard at all! I swapped to history and philosophy of science as soon as I could; perhaps unsurprisingly became interested in the history of exploration, particularly in the 16th century. 

The strange thing about my path into history of science is there was also a path out of it in that the sorts of things I wanted to study at graduate level, were not things that counted as HPS back in the day at Cambridge. I was really interested in cultural encounters and exploration of the empire in the 16th century, which meant the study of the Iberian empires. 

Back then the history of anthropology wasn't really seen as starting before the 19th century. I was also interested in maps, and in visual sources. But it seemed as if the kind of discipline in which I'd have to work on that would be something like English literature, because that was where people looked at travel writing as a primary source or one of the places where maps were taken seriously. 

My PhD is actually in Renaissance studies more broadly, and it was only as I started drafting that dissertation into a book that I actually suddenly realised: 'Oh – I'm not merely a cultural historian; I actually have things to say to history of science'. It actually was a moment of realising that the book of the dissertation was still about history of science, the discipline that didn't think the things I had to say were part of it. 

Thomas Spiteri: Through your work in HPS, how have you seen your understanding of what counts as scientific knowledge evolve? 

Surekha Davies: I guess there was an early moment as an undergrad reading Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre. As I say this, I realise of course that was not a work of history of science, either. What Darnton tells us is that when we see things in our primary sources that look strange or irrational, that we shouldn't assume those are simply signs of people in the past being irrational, or stupid, or ignorant. But those things that make no sense like, in his case these 18th century workers laughing at the thought of dead cats actually told us something fundamental about society.  

That was something I took into the history of science, so that when I saw, for example, huge illustrations of scientific instruments or of peoples of the world on maps, when I saw images of monstrous peoples with, for example, their faces in their chests, I didn't look and think: 'Oh my goodness, look at that: 16th century people being foolish again'. My understanding of scientific knowledge very early on became one of: if I look for it, looking like it looks today, I will not see most of it. 

[00:05:05] 

Thomas Spiteri: I want to pick up on looking and seeing. HPS as a field sometimes leans quite heavily on textual sources, but as you've mentioned, your work foregrounds material culture and visual evidence. What do these sources allow us to see or ask that texts might overlook? 

Surekha Davies: I guess I had a moment of suddenly realising the answer to your question about 12 years ago. I was at a conference on Early Modern European science as a visual pursuit. It was two-day, in London, conference and as I listened to the papers, I became kind of increasingly unsettled; and by the end of the conference, I realised why. 

So, here was a topic that was of great interest to me. I was waiting to hear whether that first book was gonna go under contract. It was to me very much about science as a visual pursuit. It was about illustrated maps, knowledge about distant places, and the invention of the idea of the human. But, over this conference, there were no papers about making visual knowledge about the new world. There were no papers about maps, and there were no papers about cultural encounters or visual ethnography. 

I realised that, actually, if you are interested in the epistemic power of the visual, in the history of science – for the Early Modern period at least, there was no better artefact to imagine than an illustrated map. Because, that particular artefact was one that was a diagram where you put people on it, for example, or animals, weighted those images with meaning because latitude especially was thought to affect bodies and minds.  

There was also the issue of how you make knowledge at a distance; how you know whether you found a new animal, or simply a one-off error. You know, the challenges of making knowledge about living things so far away: that you might have to take the testimony of people who went there, they may not be able to preserve specimens when they come back; and of course, knowledge about human beings. How Europeans told those stories has been so fundamental to shaping the origin, and the shape of the modern world through ideas about race and empire.  

I think visual sources are utterly fundamental for the history of science in ways that I think really remain to be tapped. Those sources may not be where people are used to looking for the history of science sources, say, the Royal Society. 

[00:08:02] 

Thomas Spiteri: Your new book Humans: A Monstrous History explores big questions about humanity through the lens of monstrosity. Could you give us an overview of its central ideas, how you use monsters to examine what it means to be human and why those boundaries matter? 

Surekha Davies: Sure, so the book is a history of humanity told through ideas about monsters and monster making from antiquity to the present. It's about how people used the monster to define what human means and then the consequences for their time. By monster I simply mean category-breakers: if you have categories, the things that don't appear to fit. 

I look at them at three kinds of boundaries between human and other stuff like animals, machines, gods. I look at how ideas about monsters define the boundaries of social categories of gender, of race, nation; and about how the parameters of what counted as normal for a human body and what it could do were defined by stories about monsters: think about words like giant, or freak, or genius.  

I show in this book, as I go thematically from earth to outer space, how today's problems and questions about climate, labour, technology and human rights, are entangled with really ancient assumptions about who counts as human and the boundary – or lack thereof – between us and everything else. I bring together science, history, literature and pop culture to ask and answer these questions. 

[00:09:47] 

Thomas Spiteri: To what extent do you see monstrosity operating as an epistemic category, not just moral or aesthetic – but one that structured how knowledge was collected and classified, or how it generated and tested knowledge in its time, rather than serving as some kind of label for the strange or the sinful. 

Surekha Davies: That really is the core of my thinking that you've picked up on: that monster is simply a word with which people are saying something about what they know and what they don't know. They're the beings that don't fit their categories, and all of those other interpretations of monster, the moral ones, the aesthetic ones; they stem from the idea of the monster as "the things that aren't fitting the categories".  

So, how have they structured knowledge? I think the Early Modern curiosity cabinet is a great example for this. These places were like rooms in which people put rare things and unusual things. You could have an encounter here in this kind of epistemic installation. Even the act of describing the things in your curiosity cabinet meant that you had to make decisions about the structure of the things in the world: animal, mineral, vegetable – things made by people.  

Collectors would ask people to collect for them the things that were strange and unusual, and they would study them to try and figure out how knowledge was structured. For natural history, the monster was always present, whether or not that was the word that people used. 

[00:11:28] 

Thomas Spiteri: Your book moves across European, American; global contexts. How did these ideas of monstrosity travel across these regions, and what happened to those ideas when they were taken up in colonial or cartographic contexts and projects? 

Surekha Davies: The ideas about monsters moved through space, but also through time and in the case of European colonial and cartographic projects, ancient Greek and Roman ideas about the human body lay at the heart of this. So, the body was supposedly malleable, the humours in the body were shaped by the environment, what you ate, the latitude; especially in very harsh climates: very cold, very hot, your body would supposedly change.  

There was this idea that in distant places, there were entire peoples who were monstrous. Pliny writes about people with their faces in their chests, people with one single giant foot, for example. In a temperate climate, you would only have like one-off accidental monsters or monsters sent by the gods of science. But you know, theoretically, if you travelled to distant parts of the world, you would encounter monstrous peoples. 

Once European ships are circumnavigating the globe, the question that arises is: where's the boundary between human space and monster space? As you meet people with very different lifestyles in, you know, the Caribbean or in Patagonia, you see the language of monstrosity, you see the word appearing. When images and descriptions of these peoples appear on maps, the maps themselves, world maps, continental maps laid out using latitude and longitude – they made visual arguments about why people in different places might be fundamentally different from people in Europe, in ways that would, for example, justify colonial projects. 

[00:13:36] 

Thomas Spiteri: Was there an object or an episode in your research that particularly encapsulates this entanglement of science, empire and monstrosity? Did anything maybe in the archive or in the material that you were looking at surprise you, or shift how you think about monstrosity, or humanity? 

Surekha Davies: I guess visiting the oldest surviving 16th century curiosity cabinet was that object for me. This is Schloss Ambras, the curiosity cabinet in Schloss Ambras in Innsbruk, in Austria, which dates from the 16th century, just extraordinary: enormous room with things animal, mineral, vegetable, things made by people, stuff from around the world. 

Maybe one quarter of it, one corner of it has a variety of portraits of people; these are people who were unusual. There are several portraits of this family known as the Hairy Family: the family of Petrus Gonsalvus, who, as a boy was kidnapped from the Canary Islands – there's your colonialism by the Spanish. He ended up at the French court, brought up there, and he was very hairy. He was covered in hair, his face was covered in hair, and most of his children were unusually hairy even though he married a typical woman. Portraits of him and his children appear in Schloss Ambras. They're in beautiful, fine European clothing but portrayed with caves in the background, suggesting their wildness.  

Also, in that portrait corner are giant portraits of dwarves; portraits of someone who was gored by a lance through his eye, but lived, and he's there with the lance in his eye; there's Vlad III Țepeș, the inspiration for Dracula; somebody who's with congenital joint problems. It struck me that actually all of these people were here because they were seen as breaking the category of the human, that range from people from far away, people whose bodies were different from birth, people who had unfortunate accidents. They were all here in this cabinet of curiosities for what they supposedly said about the "edge of the human". 

[00:16:11] 

Thomas Spiteri: Surekha, I wonder in what ways you see your book as contributing to, or even challenging current conversations in HPS – particularly about race and taxonomy, and legacies of early modern science. 

Surekha Davies: I wrote this book for people who are curious about how science, society, and culture shape one another; that is not the same as historians of science or HPS people. So, I'm kind of throwing down the gauntlet here and saying this book is for a category of people that intersects with specialists in HPS but was written for a general audience.  

One of the ways in which it challenges current conversations is the way in which it juxtaposes very contrasting sources in the same book, sometimes in the same chapter, or even section. This is a book in which writings by ancient authors like Aristotle and Pliny are jostling with the Muppet Show, with Monsters, Incorporated. 

It's a space where the era of the Renaissance of the 16th century is jostling with the ways in which today's technologies are dehumanising and unsettling the category of the human. Moving across, between "scientific sources"– quote unquote – and other spaces in order to talk about how ideas about the human operate in the world. That comes out of this being a book engaged with the questions, the sources and curious readers who transcend, but also include historians of science and philosophers of science. 

[00:18:04] 

Thomas Spiteri: Surekha, thank you so much for your time today. Where can our listeners find your work, or more about yourself, your past research, future research? 

Surekha Davies: For all things, my website and my newsletter are the place to keep up with things. You can get an excerpt of my book for free by signing up for my free newsletter Notes From an Everything Historian. 

In terms of social media, I'm terminally on Bluesky, so, that's where you'll find me most often. I also have Instagram as the other place I appear and master on, but surekhadavies.org will take you to excerpts, podcast videos, and the signup for my new book which is out from the University of California Press, Humans: A Monstrous History. 

Thomas Spiteri: Thank you so much. 

Surekha Davies: Thank you! 

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Thank you for listening to the HPS Podcast. If you're interested in the detail of today's conversation, you can access the transcript soon on our website at hpsunimelb.org.  

Stay connected with us on social media, including Bluesky for updates, extras, and further discussion. And finally, this podcast would not be possible without the support of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne, and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant Scheme. 

We look forward to welcoming you back next time.  

Transcribed 

Contributor: Christine Polowyj 

Christine Polowyj is an undergraduate majoring in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne. She is interested in examining how knowledge is undermined or obscured when appeals to logic are made in particular social and historical contexts.