'What Makes Us Love’ podcast looks at love of animals

Princess Ekaterina Dmitrievna Golitsyna with her lapdog, from the Pushkin Museum.

Is the love we feel for animals different from that we feel for humans? Laura Brown explores the nature of love in “What Makes Us Love,” the new episode in the “What Makes Us Human?” podcast series.

“What Makes Us Human?” from the College of Arts and Sciences, showcases the newest thinking from across the disciplines about what it means to be human in the 21st century. Featuring 3-4 minute audio essays written and recorded by Cornell faculty, the series releases a new episode each Tuesday through the fall.

“If we think of literature as a distinctively human enterprise, and love as a distinctively human capacity, we get stuck when it comes to pets, since these nonhuman animals spark literary innovation and challenge us to imagine cross-species love,” says Brown, the John Wendell Anderson Professor of English. Brown’s most recent book, “Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Literary Imagination,” defines the formative impact of nonhuman beings in English literary history.

The “What Makes Us Human” podcasts are available for download on iTunes and SoundCloud and for streaming at as.cornell.edu/humanities, where text versions of the essays are also posted.

- Linda B. Glaser

Media Contact

Jeff Tyson