Rebecca Woods

Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
VC 314, Victoria College, 91 Charles St. W., University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 1K7
416-978-4950

Campus

Education

PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cross-Appointments

Department of History

Fields of Study

Biography

Rebecca Woods is an historian of science, environment, and animals working primarily in the 19th century. Woods's research explores the complex cultural histories of diverse animals, ranging from extinct woolly mammoths to imperial sheep and cattle, as they figure into scientific thought, technological change, and ecologies both real and imagined. Her first book, The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800-1900 (UNC Press, 2017) examined how breeds of sheep and cattle circulated and were altered under imperial conditions in the nineteenth century. Woods's current research examines the history of frozen mammoths and how these individual animals have shaped and contributed to environmental and palentological thought since the late 18th century. From the rarest of scientific specimens, with contemporary global warming, these and other Pleistocene megafauna now emerge from the Siberian and North American permafrost on a seasonal basis, becoming bellwethers for a warming planet.

Selected Publications

“Telling Time with Mammoths: Frozen Flesh and Temporal Arrangement in the Circumpolar North Since 1800”  Journal for the History of Knowledge 4 (2023): 33-52

“Anticipating Extinction: Mammoths, Elephants, and the Late 19th-Century Ivory Trade”  In Anticipatory Environmental (Hi)stories, edited by Christopher Schliephake and Evi Zemanek, 143-54. (London, Lexington Books : 2023)

“‘The Shape of Meat’: Preserving Animal Flesh in Victorian Britain” Osiris 35 (2020): 123-41

The Herds Shot Round the World Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800–1900  (The University of North Carolina Press, 2017)

“Nature and the Refrigerating Machine: The Politics and Production of Cold in the Nineteenth Century” in Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, edited by Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal,(Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2017): 89-116.

“From Colonial Animal to Imperial Edible: Building an Empire of Sheep in New Zealand, c. 1880-1900”  Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 35, 1 (2015): 117-136.

“Breed, Culture, and Economy: The New Zealand Frozen Meat Trade, 1880-1914” Agricultural History Review 60, II (2012): 288-308.