The American Book Center - ABCAbout
Please join us in ABC Amsterdam for an afternoon with Surekha Davies, author of Humans: A Monstrous History. She will talk about her book, have a Q&A, and sign the book afterwards.
About the book:
Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. In this conversation with biographer and book critic Julie Phillips, award-winning historian of science Dr. Surekha Davies will discuss her new book, Humans: A Monstrous History. The book reveals how people have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, identified monsters between these categories, and invented race, gender, and nations along the way. Combining medieval maps and Linnaeus's system of classification, Renaissance curiosities and science-fiction cyborgs, Darwin's Origin of Species and Frankenstein's monster, Humans: A Monstrous History shows how monster-making lies at the foundations of the modern world. Through monsters, people define what they mean by 'normal.' In an age when corporations increasingly see people as obstacles to profits, the long history of monster-making helps chart a better path for the future. This is not a history of monsters, but a history through monsters.
About the author:
Dr. Surekha Davies is a British historian of science, speaker, historical-monster consultant, and the author of Humans: A Monstrous History (University of California Press, 2025), one of History Today's "Best Books of the Year 2025," and the prizewinning Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge University Press). Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian Magazine, the Times Literary Supplement, Nature, Science, Aeon, Reactor, and elsewhere. A former British Library map curator and history professor, she speaks and consults on the histories of science, society, museums, and the arts; knowledge and media revolutions; the age of European exploration; and (of course) monsters.
Author image credit: Anne Ryan
About the moderator:
Julie Phillips is an award-winning American biographer and the author of The Baby on the Fire Escape, on creativity and mothering, and James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. She lives in Amsterdam, writes for Trouw, is a member of the Xenophiles, and is currently writing a biography of Ursula K. Le Guin.
Speakers
- Surekha Davies