Join CEMS and MMoR for a talk with Dr. Surekha Davies’ on her newly published book Humans: A Monstrous History (University of California Press, 2025). Dr. Davies tells a history of how humans have created monsters out of one another, from ancient gods to generative AI. She will be in conversation with Dr. Hannah Dawson.
Taking place at Nash Lecture Theatre, King's College London. The talk will be followed by a reception in the Somerset Room.
Register your attendance here: Tickets
Book Description - Humans: A Monstrous History
A history of how humans have created monsters out of one another—from our deepest fears—and what these monsters tell us about humanity's present and future.
Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. Join award-winning historian of science Dr. Surekha Davies as she reveals how people have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how they invented race, gender, and nations along the way. With rich, evocative storytelling that braids together ancient gods and generative AI, Frankenstein's monster and E.T., Humans: A Monstrous History shows how monster-making is about control: it defines who gets to count as normal.
In an age when corporations increasingly see people as obstacles to profits, this book traces the long, volatile history of monster-making and charts a better path for the future. The result is a profound, effervescent, empowering retelling of the history of the world for anyone who wants to reverse rising inequality and polarization. This is not a history of monsters, but a history through monsters.
Speaker Bios
Dr. Surekha Davies is a British author, speaker, and historian of science, art, and ideas. Her first book, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters, won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history from the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Roland H. Bainton Prize in History and Theology. She has written essays and reviews about the histories of biology, anthropology, and monsters in the Times Literary Supplement, Nature, Science, and Aeon.
Dr. Hannah Dawson is Reader in the History of Political Thought at King’s College London.