Current Research
My current research focuses on ideas about elephants since the eighteenth century. Throughout the process of writing my book, Savages and Beasts: The
Birth of the Modern Zoo, I collected stories about elephants. With the support of a Fellowship from the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian
National University in Canberra, Australia and then a Fellowship from the National Endoment for the Humanities, I have been researching and writing about how our ideas about elephants have changed over the last centuries. In 2008, as I've been winding down my research on elephants, I began a new project on the history of butterfly collecting in German New Guinea at the end of the nineteenth century. In the summer of 2008, with the help of a Grant from the Research Growth Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I spent a month in Madang Province, PNG, collecting materials for the project.