MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | MONSTROSITIES | FALL 2026

There be Monsters Beneath Us?

From monstrous beings at the margins of medieval maps to contemporary climate anxiety in eco-horror movies, there is something scary about the idea that the land might be alive and filled with unknown beings. It is a fairly common argument that the medieval European tradition of the Wild Man served as a template for Christian colonial encounters with indigenous peoples. The Wild Man is the primitive “Other” who defines the civilized “Us.” However, 19th century anthropologists such as Tyler and Frazier, who ranked religions from primitive to civilized, equated the animist practices of native peoples with those of European peasants. In this talk I re-examine relationships to land in European ideas about wild men, primitives and peasants, in order to figure out why animate landscapes threaten modern ideas of what it means to be human and why, when we try to imagine alternative relationships to land, we seem end up in the Chthulucene.

Monstrosities
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Center for the Humanities · 95 Pearl Street, Middletown, CT 06459
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