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Podcast: New Books in Environmental Studies
Episode: Rachel Mundy, "Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening" (Wesleyan UP, 2018)
Description: âWhat makes song sparrows, Verdi, medieval monks, and minstrelsy part of the same taxonomy?â So asksâand answersâRachel Mundy, who is Assistant Professor of Music at Rutgers UniversityâNewark. In her book, Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), Mundy shows how the history of the humanities is intimately connected with the lives of animals.Focusing on animal musicality, with a particular emphasis on birdsong, Mundy recounts dozens of twentieth-century encountersâin North America, Europe, and Africaâbetween animals and human researchers working in a variety of fields, work we now recognize as belonging to t...