Articles, Chapters, etc.
My writing explores strange, forgotten, obsolete, and usually irrelevant facets of the natural sciences from ancient anatomies and Renaissance wonder cabinets to taxidermied animal heroes and the back end of a beaver.
If you'd like to read about said back end (and I'm sure you do), here's a link to my article "How to Scrutinize a Beaver" published in the Believer Magazine, 2013.
I have written for The Believer, Canada's History, The New York Times and the fabulous ScienceFriday blog. I have also contributed chapters and essays to several artist catalogs and academic volumes.
Chapters:
2016. "The Beavers of Stanley Park," Animal Metropolis, University of Calgary
2014. "How to Scrutinize a Beaver," Read Harder: The Best of Believer II, Believer Books
2011. "The Living Body of Balto," The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie, University of Virginia Press.
2010. "Botched Animals and Enigmatic Beasts," Curious Collectors, Collected Curiosities: An Interdisciplinary Study, Cambridge Scholars Press.
2005. "Vegetal Prejudice in Early Modern England," Textual Healing: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Medicine. Brill Academic Press.
Selected Magazines, Journals, etc:
2017. "Beaver Utopia," Canada's History, 97:4.
2015. "Pantone Beaver: this gland is your gland, " Cabinet Magazine, 56.
2015. "Why I am Not a Taxidermist," New York Times [Read online +]
2014. "Five Books Guaranteed to Make Kids Love Science," ScienceFriday [Read online +]
2013. "Giant Spiders and Making Walking," TREK: The Magazine of the University of British Columbia.
2012. "The Barely-There Albino Wallaby," Preserved! [Read online +]
2012. "A Case for Darwin," Cabinet Magazine, 47.
2012. "How to Scrutinize a Beaver," The Believer, 10:7.
2012. “Preservation Society,” The New Inquiry, 8.
2012. "Obsessed: Taxidermy," Huffington Post [Read online +]
2012. "UBC's King of Cult," TREK: The Magazine of the University of British Columbia.
2012. Interview with feather artist Kate MccGwire, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, 20. Alternative Ornithologies.
2011. “The Beastly Art of Taxidermy,” TREK: The Magazine of the University of British Columbia.
2008. "The Matter and Meaning of Museum Taxidermy," museum & society 6:2. [Read online +]
2008. "Ophelia by the Idiots" reprinted from ravishingbeasts in Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, 7.
2008. "Hunting the Windy Vapors" (a medical history of the windy passions), The Believer, 6:8.
2008. "Objects of Loss and Remembrance," Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, 6. Special edition: Rogue Taxidermy.
2007. "The Visual Erotics of the Mini-Marriage" (a cross-eyed history of cute), The Believer, 5:9.
Exhibition Catalogues:
2016. "Holding True," Nikola Irmer, Love Birds, Sir?
2011. "An Intimacy of Animal Looking," Fern Helfand: About Looking. Vernon Public Art Gallery.
2010. Ravishing Beasts: The Strangely Alluring World of Taxidermy. Museum of Vancouver.
2009. "Immortal Beauties," Mary Frey: Imaging Fauna.
Book Reviews:
2013. Humanimalia, 5:1. Title reviewed, Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee, and Paul Youngquist, ed. Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective
2012. Archives of Natural History 38:2Title reviewed: Pat Morris, A History of Taxidermy: Art, Science and Bad Taste.
2004. "Dissecting Disciplinarity," Canadian Literature. 182: 141-143. (Titles reviewed: Between Literature and Science: Poe, Lem, and Explorations in Aesthetics, Cognitive Science, and Literary Knowledge, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, and The Living Prism: Itineraries in Comparative Literature)
2003. "Curious Knowledge," Canadian Literature. 179: 115-118. (Titles reviewed: The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and their Collectors, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, and The Oxford Companion to the Body)
2002. "The Alphabet of Suffering," Canadian Literature. 174: 117-119. (Titles reviewed: Idioglossia and The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth- Century English Culture)