On any given year, there are around 8 UW-Madison faculty serving as Senior Fellows at IRH. These fellowships, which span four years, are given to those tenured faculty who have demonstrated an exemplary record of research and dedication to their field. In 2021, Mario Ortiz-Robles was chosen for this competitive award.
A former IRH Resident Fellow (2010–2011), Mario is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor and Nancy C. Hoefs Professor of English at UW–Madison. His current book project, Future Anterior: How Nineteenth-Century Institutions Framed the Future of Animals, traces the cultural history of animals in the nineteenth century. Initially, the project was organized around the different ways public institutions—natural history museums, circuses, and zoos—displayed and represented animals, but Mario has since shifted his focus from institutions themselves to specific animals and species, and the narratives we construct to “institutionalize” them.
It is this theme of “institutionalization” that guided Mario’s Monday Seminar presentation back in the fall of 2022. The talk traced the history of Jumbo, the African elephant who, after a career as zoo “pet,” circus performer, and, once dead, a museum display, entered the cultural imaginary as a fictional character (Disney’s Dumbo) and the public lexicon as a figure for something like technological gigantism (jumbo jet, Jumbotron, etc.). As Mario sees it, the fictionalization of animals such as Jumbo is not always a bad thing: in some ways, in brings us closer to them. Yet at the same time, he worries it can abstract them from their natural environment and their often precarious state in the wild. The tension between these realities is not lost on Mario: “The irony is that these fictions may now be our best, and perhaps our only, means of fighting catastrophic biodiversity loss,” he commented.
In fact, this upshot is exactly what Mario hoped that his audience would take away from his Focus on the Humanities talk this past fall. There, Mario’s study centered around the axolotl, an endangered neotenic salamander endemic to the wetlands surrounding present-day Mexico City, and which was first put on display at the Jardin zoologique d’acclimatation in Paris in the 1860s. And, after it was successfully bred in captivity, it became a prized laboratory animal, used to this day as a model organism in developmental biology and regenerative medicine. At the same time as its institutionalization made it possible for the public to come into contact with such a rare creature and to benefit from its strange biology, its precarious existence in the wild has come to symbolize our ambivalent attitude toward the prospect of mass extinction—or so Mario argued.
Originally centered around philosophical debates about animal-human relations (think Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation), Animal Studies has since shifted its center of attention to the more immediate concerns posed by the catastrophic loss of biodiversity. Mario first became interested in this field of study by reading nineteenth-century novels—not because these novels represents animals, but because of Darwin’s footprint on literature toward the end of that century. “As I began to read Darwin seriously I noticed that while his language and the narrative implications of his theory of evolution can be felt across literary genres, animals—the object of his study—were nowhere to be found *in* literature,” Mario mused. For him, Animal Studies filled that gap, as it traced the history of animal rights back to the nineteenth century and the different Parliamentary Acts in the United Kingdom designed to prevent or mitigate animal cruelty.
As a Senior Fellow, Mario also had the opportunity to organize a Burdick-Vary symposium. Of course, given the nature of his research, Mario was not about to do things the traditional way. This fall, Mario is convening a meeting of the Vcologies (Victorian Ecologies) Working Group, a multi-institutional group of scholars whose work focuses on nineteenth-century ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities. The twist? This year’s meeting, with the theme “Victorian Futures,” has a field trip component: Mario will transport participants to the Aldo Leopold Foundation in Baraboo, WI, with the aim of exploring Leopold’s legacy and the relation his writings bear to the rich tradition of Victorian nature writing. This place-based component of the workshop, Mario explained, “gives participants an opportunity to reflect upon the different ways our scholarly work is situated in particular environmental contexts and share the different ways in portwhich our relation to the natural world informs our scholarship.”
Four years is a long time to be a fellow. Of all the memories, Mario most appreciates the weekly Monday seminars at IRH. “I often find myself thinking about our Monday discussions for days after the seminar,” Mario told us. “One of the most fruitful aspects of the seminars is that the multidisciplinary nature of the IRH membership compels both presenters and the public to consider perspectives we seldom entertain in our siloed disciplines. It has made me be more conscious of my audience when I write and, more generally, of the need for all humanists to strive to broaden the audience for the Humanities.”
But some of the brightest moments of Mario’s IRH experience were also the most ordinary, such as conversations in the IRH kitchen, or at a bar outing with the fellows. To this end, as a two-time IRH fellow, Mario offers the following advice to incoming fellows: “Be an active participant, not only by attending seminars and social events, but also by being open to hallway exchanges.”