HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY is under contract, as a lead trade-list title, with the University of California Press, and will be published in 2025. For book news and special offers closer to the time, and for short, fun and (often) zany essays on history, art, culture, science, books, or monsters (1-2 issues a month), sign up for my free newsletter here.

HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY tells a transregional history from antiquity to the present, a history of people’s attempts to understand themselves and the world through who and what they thought broke the category of the human. It reveals how people have categorized beings in and beyond the world, perceived otherness, and sought to control those who challenged social orders.

Through this narrative I show how today’s troubling divisions and urgent questions about nature, society, and technology are built on age-old anxieties, now called by other names. The result is a history of humanity through monsters and monster-making: ideas, theories, and actions people took around what they saw to be category-disrupting beings and communities.